Denisovan Ancestry in East Eurasian and Native American Populations

04 September 2011

Hexagon Rock

Hexagon Rock
Ansted, West Virginia, find by Ken Johnston
(click photo to expand)

This six-sided platter was found among suspected crude stone tools and two possible bird head sculptures in a 30 meter surface sample of the Shady Creek bed at Ansted, West Virginia.  The bird heads have been the subject of two recent postings on this blog.  I searched the internet for images of hexagon shaped rocks and could not find any other than the kind of hexagon basalt formations from well-known Giants Causeway in Ireland and other sites.  I then began to ponder the statistical probabilities of a natural rock having six sides of relative proportional equity.  Not being a statistician, I thought I'd post it here for others to consider and comment on.  


A similar looking, hexagon-shaped, stone from the Gault, Texas, site has a grooved double pattern which clearly identifies it as an artifact.  The West Virginia hexagon rock has no such visible etchings but was found in a cut from a geologically recent creek bed and may be water worn.  The Gault artifact appears to have had a break on the right side as pictured here and, if so, plausibly could have had a more equitable hexagon shape prior to the break.  The lower right corner hints at an angle of the former edge of a more proportionally shaped hexagon rock.

The Gault site engraved plaque could have been a more proportionally uniform hexagon shape at one time and then broken as the red line drawn on the West Virginia hexagon rock illustrates.  A foot-long ruler is pictured across the rock.
For those people familiar with geometry and aesthetics, perhaps there is something to this piece.  Having found no images of hexagonal rocks on the web and finding this in a possible tool and art context, make it a candidate for possible artifactuality, perhaps a functional platter like object, but maybe intentionally made with six sides for the novelty or some culturally mediated or aesthetic purpose.  I note the outline as seen in the diagram below somewhat resembles the profile, in an angular, stylized way, of a right side of a mammoth or mastodon which is sometimes represented by its simplest features in paleoart.


Mammuthus columbi, Columbian mammoth palentologist's photo reconstruction with white markups made by me to highlight major visual lines of the extinct animal and how they form a hexagon in rough proportion to the Ansted, West Virginia rock and possibly the Gault, Texas, engraved art piece.

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