There is evidence to suggest that our cave-dwelling ancestors polished

EXPLANATION FROM Fox LSAT

Wait a minute. Just because the cave-dwellers polished their flints more than was necessary for hunting proves that they have an “aesthetic sense”? Why?

Maybe they polished the flints because they used them to magnify the sun’s rays and start fires. Maybe they polished the flints because they used them to do primitive surgeries on each other. Maybe they polished the flints because they used them to signal the Martian mother ship when they were ready to receive their daily anal probes. Maybe they polished the flints because their religious leaders told them that masturbation was evil, and encouraged them to constantly polish their flints as a way to avoid, you know, polishing something else.

The point is this: There might be a million other reasons why the flints are so deeply polished. Sure, aesthetics are a very likely candidate. (Look at the pretty!) But there could also be infinite other reasons, like the above, which have nothing to do with aesthetics. And if any one of those other reasons were true, they’d make the speaker look very silly.

The correct answer might not be anything we’ve predicted so far. “Anal probe signal” and “anti-masturbation tool” seem particularly unlikely. But these predictions are the right type of answer. Let’s see what’s actually available.

A) Who cares? There are some highly polished flints. The argument was trying to explain why they are so highly polished. Aesthetics was offered as the explanation. The fact that most flints weren’t highly polished does nothing to interfere with the idea that the polished ones were polished for aesthetic reasons. No way.

B) Nope. Just because they didn’t have cave paintings doesn’t mean they didn’t have an aesthetic sense. Maybe they hadn’t invented cave painting technology at the time. Or maybe they’d already moved past cave paintings. Maybe Queer Eye for the Cave Guy had told them that cave paintings were passé.

C) This could be it, if we assume that religious ceremonies have nothing to do with aesthetics. But aren’t religious ceremonies, in reality, about almost nothing but aesthetics? They’re patently nonsensical, so what value could religious ceremonies possibly have besides the pretty stuff? This answer feels like a trap to me.

D) This also feels like a trap, because it doesn’t explain why everyday chores would require a highly polished flint. Check out my alternative explanations, above. All of them would require polished flints. An “everyday chore” might mean they used the flints for scraping ticks off each other’s asses. That probably wouldn’t require a polished flint.

E) Nah. Just because aesthetic benefits would be poorly understood doesn’t mean there weren’t aesthetic benefits. This is a fairly common incorrect answer. There’s no way this is it.

After passing on all five answers, I’ve narrowed it down to C and D. (I hated A, B, and E.) I’m super-skeptical of C, because “religious ceremony” sounds way too much like an aesthetic use. “Everyday chore,” on the other hand, could possibly connect to one of our predictions at the top. Starting a fire could be a daily chore, right? Or, hey wait a minute! Didn’t we actually say that calling down the Martian mothership for the anal probe was a daily chore? If we substitute “starting a fire” or “calling down the mothership for the anal probe” for “everyday chore,” then D provides a really good reason—a reason other than aesthetics— for why the flints are polished.

So our answer is D.