Pre-contact Maori whalebone club

[fearn]

I'll point out you don't even need a bow drill. A simple piece of Equisetum and sand, twirled in one's hands, will make a round hole in jade. Any effort to make fire by twirling a stick in wood will make a round hole.

All I can say to that is DUH!

Circles, especially concentric circles, are harder.

Three of them, the same size, are harder still. I don't think I ever said impossible.

Or are they the same size? In all this frenzy of "evidence," I'm not seeing numbers, nor am I seeing close-ups of those features or any other.

Remember, hard is not impossible.

However, the argument that Ron and others are putting forward is that, for reasons unknown, a Stone Age artist meticulously produced a piece that looks exactly as if it was made with steel tools.

What's fascinating is how we've gotten to the point where people are casting around for bits of evidence to prove their preconceptions, rather than objectively looking at the piece and asking what the evidence says.

Yes, a lot of money is involved, and perhaps that's the problem. If you want to objectively analyze a piece, I'd suggest looking at it as if one bought it for a song at a garage sale, and ignore the fact that a well-known collector owned it before you.

It might also be good to ask the well-known collectors here how often the picked up a mysterious piece of unknown provenance and held onto it, simply in the hope that, one day, it would all make sense. That is another type of evidence that no one on this thread is looking for.

F