# https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJmN6vvftwg # by @MegalithHunter Well, well, well, it looks like 2025 will be a bumper crop year for Archaological Ritual Hallucinations... This paper at least is about a definitely human-made carving, unlike like the Ségognole "river map" of the last video. Actually, that is the only conclusion of the paper that makes sense. Actually, that fact is quite obvious just by the appearance of the grooves, even without all that computer analysis. But all the other interpretations the paper makes about the meaning of the carving and the activities in the "ritual space" is pure delirious fantasy, unsupported and even contradicted by the presented evidence. For starters, 1/5. THE "RITUAL AREA" WAS UN-INHABITABLE AND WAS NEVER USED * There is absolutely NO evidence that people ever spent any time in Area A (the big room with the "ritual space"). Much less that "hundreds" periodically gathered there for "rituals". NONE. There are no other carvings or pictures in the room, no soot marks or dropped charcoal bits from torches. The authors base their claim that Area A was a "ritual space" EXCLUSIVLEY on their interpretation of the grooves on that boulder. * The soot particles found embedded in the stalagmites around Area A could have drifted down there from fires in the domestic area. * Moreover, the fact that the soot particles got embedded into those stalagmites shows that -- at the time the particles were deposited, and and for centuries thereafter -- the lower half of the cave was wet, with water dripping from the ceiling. * Indeed, the absence of stalagmites within the "ritual area" proper, between the "portal" and the Eastern talus, indicates that its floor was wet or underwater during the epoch when the stalgmites in other areas were formed. (Stalagmites only begin to form when dripping water dries out where it fell.) * In fact, as seen in the included movie, the "turtle" boulder lies in the deepest part of the entire cave. The water that percolated into the cave at the time must have pooled around the "boulder". Presumably the water drained through an opening at the right of that is currently blocked. In fact, there is no reason to assume that the carving on that boulder was ever seen by anyone except the "artist" who created it. 2/5. THAT IS NOT A TURTLE! * How on Earth could the authors see a turtle on those scratches? Turtle shell plaques ("scutes") come in a large variety of shapes and arrangements, but none is remotely similar to the one supposedly depicted in the boulder. For good mechanical reasons, actual turtle paques are mostly six-sided, rarely five- or four-sided, with angles of 90 degrees or more. But that imaginary "sacred turtle" has a central circle divided into six plaques shaped like pizza slices; and around it there is a ring of square plates with a sharp triangular one in the middle. * Same goes for the engraved plaque of Ein Qashish (S17-B), which apparently is the closest match that the authors could find in spite of them being supposedly separated by 10'000 years and the huge difference in size. It takes a megalithic dose of imagination to see a turtle in that engraving, too. (But maybe there was indeed a now extinct species that had a sharp conical body and no legs, as depicted in that tablet?) The only resemblance to the Manot Cave engraving is that both consist of short, thick, and mostly straight intersecting strokes. * Moreover, why would the Manot Cave artist choose a "canvas" that had space for less than half of the tutle's shell, so that the result would have no paws or head? * Moreover, figures S5-D and S6-D (supplement) show that the central groove in the "pizza" part of the "shell" crosses over the edge of the boulder and continues across the whole West face of the boulder, curving towards the South side. Unfortunately the authors did not analyze its shape and they do not say whether it is artificial. If it is, how would it fit into the "turtle" drawing? Is it supposed to represent a Sacred Serpent sprouting from the Sacred Half-Turtle? * On the West face of the boulder there is also a shorter grove that starts near the North corner, extends down diagonally maybe 5-10 cm, and vanishes gradually. There are also a few other short and indistinct groves that look like transitions from artificial to natural. * The authors contradict themselves by saying that the boulder is too heavy and thus "not easy to relocate from one place to another", but at the same time see "deliberate and strategic placement of the boulder in this particular location". More likely the boulder fell from the ceiling and ended up at its current position as part of the geological process that formed the cave -- well before it was frequented by humans. 3/5. DATING PROBLEMS The dating procedures described in the paper seem to have shortcomings, omissions, and even errors: * The authors say that the crust samples used in the dating were obtained with a "2mm drill" but do not say how deep they drilled. Since the crust grows gradually with time, the depth that is extracted will have a huge influence on the measured date. * The U-Th and oxygen isotope dates of samples on the boulder crust (figure S14-B) are NOT consistent with each other or with the proposed date. The former give (corrected) ages between 120'000 and 300'000 years for the unworked crust and 5'700 to 27'800 for the grooves, while the latter show NO significant difference between the two sets of samples. And, while the oxygen values sort of matched the values in deposits near the mouth of the cave, dated around 34-37 thousand years, they also matched the values at other dates. * Table S1 seems to contain errors. The authors claim that an arbitrary "correction factor of 1.75" was applied to the U/Th dates. Table S1 has two columns for 234U/238U ratios, labeled "Uncorrected" and "Corrected", but the numbers in both columns are identical to 4 decimal figures. There are two columns for age, also "Uncorrected" and "Corrected", but the difference is not a factor of 1.75. These problema have no direct impact on the "ritual space" interpretation, but raise questions about the quality of the numbers. 4/5. ALTERNATIVE INTERPRETATION Here is an alternative interpretation of the collected evidence. Through all the time that the upper part of the Manot Cave was in use, Area A was un-inhabitable: without any sunlight, wet, with muddy floor of slippery jumbled rocks fallen from the roof, possibly with a shallow pool around the boulder, with access through a slippery ramp. Possibly infested by bats. Anyone who ventured as far down as the Western talus, driven by curiosity, promptly turned around and never came back. But one day one of those explorers -- perhaps a child, perhaps trying to hide from someone or something -- walked all the way down to the boulder, which was the only notable feature in that otherwise utterly boring space. She noticed on it several natural cracks and grooves that crossed in some interestng pattern. So using a sharp bit of stone or antler, she spent half an hour deepening and straightening those cracks, just for fun. When her torch started to run, she left, and never came back. She was the last person to see that engraving before recent times. Thousands of years later, the entrance of the cave collapsed. Eventually the climate became drier and/or the water channels in the limestone shifted, and Area A dried out. 5/5. THE ANTLER IN AREA K * Area K, the smaller room where the antler was found, cannot be reached without climbing equipment (Supplement, page 7). It is separated from the "ritual area" of the main cave (Area A) by a smooth and steep stalagmite wall. Its entrance is a small 50 cm hole on that wall, located 3 metres above the floor on the Area A side, and 7 metres above it from the other side. So it is extremely unlikely that the antler was taken there by humans. And, indeed, no material evidence of human presence was found in Area K. The antler was probably thrown into the hole from Area A, e. g. to scare bats. Or maybe the authors have managed to push back by 37'000 years the date of the invention of basketball.