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In my estimation this is amost certainly correct. It accounts for most if not all of the observed properties of these objects. The other suggestions only ever a
by tristramb 1y ago
In my estimation this is amost certainly correct. It accounts for most if not all of the observed properties of these objects. The other suggestions only ever account for one or two. But lazy journalists, aided by AI, will no doubt continue to treat all the suggestions as equally likely.
- nemo 1y agoKnitting hadn't been invented when these were around - we know the Romans made gloves, socks, and other garments with a great deal of supporting evidence, there's not a single example of a mitten, nor of any kind of knitting like this. The Romans wove cloth on a loom and stitched it together. There's no signs of wear on any examples of the dodecahedra, so it's not a hand tool that comes into contact with wool or metals which would leave at least micro-abrasions. Whatever these were they were not a hand tool. It snows in north Italy, why wouldn't they need gloves in some places where it snows outside of Gallia? The knitting tool is among the weakest hypotheses in terms of evidence. If journalists were to refer to these as a knitting tool it would be because they were lazy and didn't do any research into that hypothesis. In general journalists writing on this tend to acknowledge scholarly opinion that their use is unknown and hypotheses about it are speculative. The lazy journalists are the ones who write about how some Youtuber decided it's a knitting tool or whatever and uncritically repeat this without researching scholarly consensus or what historians and archaeologists have to say about the tool.
- meindnoch 1y ago>It accounts for most if not all of the observed properties of these objects 1. How does it account for the different-sized holes on the dodecahedron's faces? Before you answer "to knit for different sized fingers" let me remind you that knitting doesn't work like that, that is, the diameter of the final product is determined by the distance of the pegs, which is the same across all the faces. 2. How does it account for the similar-looking Roman icosahedrons? 3. How does it account for the fact that knitting was invented hundreds of years after the fall of the Roman Empire? This is some Joe Rogan-tier crank theory, that no self-respecting archaeologist takes seriously. It's literally based on a single YouTube video, yet for some reason it gets endlessly repeated, probably because it makes people feel good that a random grandma figured out something that the fat cats of the archaeologist establishment failed to crack.
- adastra22 1y agoThis isn't knitting, it is technically nalbinding, and yes the holes are used to create different sized fingers and it works perfectly well for that purpose.