PrepTest 150, Section 2, Question 2
Ancient humans in eastern North America hunted mammoths(48 more words not shown)
The argument requires the assumption(1 more words not shown)
- Athe engraving was(9 more words not shown)
- Bthe fossil on(10 more words not shown)
- Cwhen mammoths disappeared(13 more words not shown)
- Dthe engraving technique(10 more words not shown)
- Ethere is no(12 more words not shown)
Reading the argument
You can draw an animal you've never seen.
Maybe stories of mammoths survived for generations after the animals disappeared. Someone living a thousand years later could hear those stories and engrave a mammoth. Or perhaps the object came from somewhere else, where people knew mammoths. Finding the picture here doesn't automatically establish that the artist saw a living mammoth here.
What we’re looking for
So my first concern is the connection between the engraving and the presence of local mammoths. For a required assumption, I'd initially look for something defending that connection against the stories or transported-object possibilities. Let's see what part of the argument the answers ask us to examine.
Working the answers
- ACorrect
This identifies another timing connection: when the engraving was made versus when people occupied the settlement. Even if we granted that the picture came from a time when mammoths lived nearby, how would that date the settlement's occupation?
Imagine the engraving was made 5,000 years before people moved into this settlement. An old engraved object could wind up there later. Its age wouldn't show that people occupied this particular place when the artist made it. The argument needs the engraving and the occupation to overlap to use the object in the proposed way.
That wasn't my initial objection, and it doesn't eliminate every concern about stories or transport. A required assumption can protect one needed connection without proving the whole conclusion.
- B
The animal depicted and the animal whose bone was used are different questions. Someone could engrave a mammoth on a mammoth bone or on a bone from another animal. Neither possibility by itself determines when this settlement was occupied. The argument doesn't require ruling out mammoth bone as the material.
- C
Mammoths could have survived elsewhere in North America after disappearing from the east. That wouldn't prevent this settlement from having been occupied earlier, while eastern mammoths still existed. The conclusion concerns a local overlap in time, not whether mammoths disappeared from the whole continent at once.
- D
An engraving technique could be used in several regions. That doesn't establish where this particular engraving was made or when the settlement was occupied. The argument doesn't need every other region to lack the technique for its proposed local history to be possible.
- E
A scientific dating method could exist and even provide useful evidence about the engraving. Its existence wouldn't undermine the claim that people occupied the settlement at the relevant time. The argument relies on a connection between the dates, not on there being no way to investigate one of them.
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