What is This Mysterious Stone Age Object?

A shield

Knobs for a pot lid

looks like a spinning whorl — here are some links:

http://www.butser.org.uk/iaftex_hcc.html

(snip) “The archaeological record contains a wide variety of “disks”, with central holes, and which are of the form necessary to give a “drop spindle” when a shaft is inserted through that hole. The drop spindle is known from times when no record of the spinning wheel exists and is presumed to be the earliest device for producing a continuous thread.”

the above link contains illustrations of similar objects to the one found in the russian dig.

here is a link to a pic showing how the whorl is placed on a spindle:

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_sA0GMJLjzis/R59FNcXJkCI/AAAAAAAACm8/o8Wd_YesKq4/ Soapstone+Spindles+a.JPG

this link is to an illustration of a modern woman from tibet using (an ornate) drop spindle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Tibetan_spinning_wool.jpg

and finally, here is a mayan using a drop spindle for spinning cotton — note the truncated cone whorl at the base of the spindle — (the upper-right image):

http://www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9/cmspnwev.gif

It’s a drop spindle whorl.

It’s a stick stand, for when you’re tired of carrying your stick.

to me it looks an awful lot like the stone weights used with digging sticks to harvest tubers used by the Khoisan language group of ancient Africa. it’s from the microlithic tool set the food collectors carried with them, and they looks almost exactly like the mysterious object in question.

hmmm i am going to say it looks like a cigarette extinguisher….or a knob……but my stone-age idea was it is a piece of a fire-starter. a stick would fit through the hole and a rope of some kind would be wrapped around the stick and this doohickey. when you push down on the doodad the stick rotates quickly and winds itself back up allowing you to push it down again. causing the stick to spin again thus increasing friction between the stick and another piece of wood. and is easier to do than spinning the stick with your hands………did that make sense?

I’m going to agree that it’s a drop spindle whorl.

incense holder

It is a button! Try it on for size lol.

“‘The function of this decorated object remains a puzzle,’ they say.”

Maybe it’s a (wait for it) decorative object?

I’m thinking if you put a stick through it and grains in the bottom you could easily use this like a grain crushing device to make some sort of bread. Stick this on top of a slightly bowled shape rock for a base and drop grain into it. Many primitive societies that still exist around the World have similar looking devices to crush grain, nuts, or whatever other food source to make a flat bread like food.

I with Ali S. all the way. I was going with stick through it. But that realy wont explain the decerations, right?

From the shape, I think it’s designed for expanding and opening the chakras.

It’s a nipple decoration.

Puny hu-mans. You’re knob-centric views expose your ignorance. To those of us you call “aliens”, this device is self-explanatory. The object in the photo is one piece of a two part mechanism. The item above is obviously a “Perspirus Adjustment Knob”. It is used to adjust the timing mechanism on the famous “Blamburg Machine”. This machine is used to dynamically maintain the differentiation fields that separate all 256 dimensions of existence. Too bad they only found this adjustment knob. If they had discovered the accompanying “Blamburg Machine”, it would have altered human history forever. Oh well. Live long, and phosphor – puny hu-mans.

candel holder

drawer pull, whorl …don’t be silly. It is obviously the volume knob from an early Sony receiver.

Some kind of a pedestal.

I like the ideas of many of you out there, but you have to keep the material in mind. On Mohs scale ivory has a hardness of 2.5. That’s about the same as fingernails, amber, and silver. Chert/flint is much more common and it has a hardness of ~7.

Given the size my best guess is that it is the base of some art/religious piece. Of course that’s always the line used when archaeologists don’t know what something is.

Weird, when I first tried to comment the other day the comments were down.

Anywho, I vote for millstone as well. They would use this in conjunction with another stone, possibly with grooves in it, and the hole is for a stick to use as a receptacle for whatever weights were needed.

Still doesn’t explain all the decorating, but whatever.

It looks like a handle to a door. The hole is for the screw. I have a few of those in my apartment.