The 42,000 year old instruments still making a noise in the classical world

One of the Paleolithic bone flutes, aka oldest instruments in the world 
One of the Paleolithic bone flutes, aka oldest instruments in the world 

There’s a special thrill in hearing the sound of an ancient instrument, and a CD released this week (i.e. April 21) gives us a rare chance to do it. Entitled ‘The Edge of Time’, it contains pieces and improvisations played on replicas of Paleolithic bone flutes - the oldest instruments in the world. 

How old are the originals?
Carbon dating techniques show they’re around 42,000 years old. Three of the flutes were found in the Geissenklösterle caves in Swabia in South Germany, one came from the Isturitz cave in the Pyrenees. They were buried deep in the dirt alongside hundreds of other artefacts, such as bone ornaments, household utensils, pieces of carved pottery and ivory. They’re not much to look at, just short lengths from the wing-bones of a vulture and a swan, with carved finger-holes, and a slightly fatter example from a mammoth-bone.

The three Paleolithic flutes together
The three Paleolithic flutes together

Is 42,000 years old really so impressive?
Yes, compared to instruments that are normally referred to as ancient - and typically, they’re shrouded in impressive-sounding myth, like the one which says the satyr Marsyas invented the lyra (a kind of harp), and then had a competition in music-making with Apollo (which he lost, which is why he ended up being flayed). But compared to those bone flutes they’re johnny-come-latelies. Take the shofar, the ram’s-horn blown at the Jewish festival of Rosh Hoshanah, which brought down the walls of Jericho. It seems unfathomably ancient, but in fact it only goes back a few millennia. Other cultures produced things of about the same age. There’s the aulos that once accompanied gymnastics in Ancient Greece, banned by Plato from his ideal Republic, presumably for being too exciting. The best-known ancient instrument has to be the silver trumpet found in Tutankhamun’s palace. This was played by a British army bandsman in 1939, and broadcast to the world on the BBC (the trumpet shattered, which shows you have to be careful with ancient musical instruments.)

Well at least they’re proper instruments. Don’t these bone flutes sound a bit primitive in comparison?
Not at all. In terms of the placement and carving of the holes, they’re every bit as sophisticated as medieval flutes. They were made and played by homo sapiens, after all – unlike the bone flute found in 1995 in Slovenia, which is reckoned to be around 67,000 years old. That’s crude in comparison, which some people say shows it was made by Neanderthals. The likeliest explanation for the holes is that they were made by a carnivore’s teeth.

But why would our cave-dwelling ancestors made music anyway? Didn’t they have better things to do, like fighting off passing carnivores and looking for the next meal?
It depends who you ask. The pre-Christian Roman thinker Lucretius thought music arose when humans tried to imitate the sound of bird-calls. Some people think music was a way of communicating in Palaeolithic times, before it was pushed aside by language. During the Enlightenment there was a craze for theories about how language arose. Rousseau thought that for our distant ancestors singing and speaking were pretty much the same. As he saw it, early humans weren’t too concerned to recite dry facts about the world; they wanted to show how they felt about the world, and encourage others to feel the same. Singing, maybe mixed with sounds to imitate the natural world, was the best way to do that.

That sounds very poetic, but what do real scientists think?
Actually Rousseau may not be so wide of the mark, according to some researchers. Music and language may have been joined together in a kind of expressive ‘musilanguage’, made of a mixture of sounds and words. But there are many other theories about the origins of music. Charles Darwin thought it was all to do with courtship. Playing music is the human equivalent of fluffing up tail-feathers; it’s all to do with showing you’ve got good genes. Nowadays researchers incline more to the idea that music derived from a concern for group survival. Playing log drums very loudly is a good way to scare off your enemies. And even if it doesn’t work, playing music together teaches us to co-operate with the group, and fall in with their rhythm. There’s nothing like playing music to encourage group solidarity. Then there are the scientists who think music arose out of  the babbling mothers do to bond with their infants. Probably there’s some truth in all these theories.

Isn’t the real truth we don’t have a clue?
Well, we can’t know for sure, and the evidence is ambiguous. Some thinkers like Steven Pinker think it’s all bunk and that music is nothing but ‘auditory cheesecake’ – meaning it has no evolutionary value to humans at all. But they’re in the minority.

How close is this CD to what human music sounded like 40,000 years ago?
We’ll never know. The pieces are all newly written by the performers, apart from one by John Cage. No-one was around to record those early musicians, and musical notation didn’t first appear until around 100 AD. The performers have used their imaginations, without being bound by any stylistic rules – which is exactly what the original pipers of those bone flutes must have done, all those years ago.

The Edge of Time: Paleolithic Bone Flutes of France and Germany is released on Delphian on 21 April

 

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