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Ugh I hate this kind of folk knowledge circlejerking

As someone with a BA in Archaeology, the idea that the Romans didn't understand the concept of knitting, is the dumbest thing I'll read today.

FFS, they weren't cave men...

So this leads me to another “might be” kind of answer.

A weight to heave lines

I know that monkey fist and similar other knots to help casting a line to a dock or whatever als frequently have weights in them, the nubs and holes could help keep it from getting lost.

Thanks. I was about to embarrass myself 😅

That might actually have been a good guess.

I’d go with some sort of game- like jumping jacks, maybe. Or some sort of weird bocce ball.

Why make such a complicated ass shape when a rope or thong of leather would serve the same end?

Just like how the figurines of busty ladies are used for "fertility rituals." I think they were just prehistoric porn.

And by immediately you mean hundreds of people working full time for decades trying to figure it out.

That is certainly one possibility, although I think the idea that these were some sort of worship object or fortune telling device by the Neoplatonists is the most likely answer, as the dodecahedron was an especially sacred object to them because it was to Plato.

A Midplatonist work attributed to the Timaeus of Plato's dialogues discusses it-

According to “Timaeus” the universe has two causes: Mind, which governs rational beings, and Necessity, which governs bodies and all irrational beings. Interpreting Plato literally, “Timaeus” affirmed the temporal creation of the cosmos, and while stating that the cosmos is capable of being destroyed by the one who created it (the Demiurge), he denied that it would ever actually be destroyed, since it is divine and the Demiurge, being good and divine himself, would never destroy divinity. In what is possibly a later addition to the text, “Timaeus” assigns numerical values to the various proportions produced by the mixture of the Same and the Different (these being the two opposing forces, productive of all motion, growth, and change in the cosmos, as discussed in the Timaeus dialogue). The substratum of all generated things is matter, and their reason-principle or logos is ideal-form. “Timaeus” then proceeds with an account of the geometrical proportions of the cosmos, finally declaring that the image of the cosmos is the dodecahedron, since that is the closest approximation to the perfect sphere, which is the image of purely intellectual reality.

https://iep.utm.edu/midplato/

Neoplatonism was a pretty big deal in the Empire in the third century.

Either that, or the Romans manufactured and buried them in order to confuse people 2000 years later.

This is my guess. Kinda like making a cube on a lathe is a test for machinists, and making a captive cube within a hollow cube is a more advanced version.