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If Music Be the Food of Love
How long have humans been making music?
Posted May 30, 2012
This image shows the earliest known muscial instrument -- a flute dated to 43,000 - 42,000 years ago from Germany.
There are a total of eight ancient flutes from sites in southwestern Germany.
There is a certain fasacination with finding the first appearance of any behavior, particularly one that so influences human emotions as music. Try thinking of the memorable scores to movies that have affected you deeply -- and then try watching those movies with the sound track turned off.
A while ago I saw the opening scene of Staying Alive -- one of the great disco movies with a wonderful soundtrack by the BeeGees. The opening scene shows Tony Manero walking down the street after leaving his job at the hardware store, swinging a can a paint as he walks. No music? Blah, nothing, just some uninteresting guy in Brooklyn. Add the compelling beat of Staying Alive, perfectly synchronized with Tony's footsteps, and we see everything about him: the pride, the strut, the conceit of a young man who knows he is good-looking and a great dancer. (Not always such a charming person, but that is another part of the movie.)
Music accompanies many of the great events of our lives: wedding, holidays, deaths, birth celebrations, performances. When it is good, music manages to speak directly to our emotions, bypassing any logic or conscious thought. It draws us in.
It has long been suggested that the stunning cave art of the Upper Paleolithic period in Europe was distributed in caves according to two criteria. One was "what is in the rock," that intuitive ability of a cave painter or sculptor to see a shape in the rock that resembles what he wants to portray and will help him bring it to life. The other is the resonance of the locality.
First documented in 1988 by Iegor Reznikoff and Michel Dauvois, the placement of paintings in prehistoric caves correlate closely with where the cave has natural acoustic resonance spots. To establish this point, Reznikoff and Dauvois walked slowly through three different, well-mapped painted caves, singing and whistling through a range of three octaves. The noted on the maps where the points of greatest resonance were and which notes produced the best resonance at each such point. The conclusion is fascinating: whatever the painted caves were used for or created for, the events included music to heighten the experience and make it more memorable.
In 2009, a team of archaeologists at Hohle Fells in southwestern Gremany uncovered the earliest indisputably musical instruments: elegant flutes made out of ivory and a wingbone of a vulture. Later finds in nearby Geißenklösterle Cave caves brought the total number of flutes to eight. Holes that can be stopped with the fingers let the player change the picth of the note produced by blowing into the flutes.
At the time these flutes were announced, they were believed to be between 40,000 and 30,000 years old, just younger than the earliest artworks in Europe, exquisite animal carvings from ivory. Art and music seemed to go hand-in-hand and to coincide roughly with the appearance of modern humans in Europe. (Neandertals had already been in Europe since about 250,000 years ago but rarely left anything that can be interpreted as art.)
Dating turns out to be one of the most important points about any archaeological or paleontological find. Sometimes artifacts are much younger than you expected; sometimes they are much older. When Tom Higham of Oxford University decided to take another look at the dating of these flutes, he understood that the technical advances in precision radiometric dating of the last few years might reveal a different answer. He was right. The flutes can now be securely dated to 43,000 and 42,000 years ago, several thousand years earlier than had been expected based on previous work.
Why does this matter? Starting at about 39,000 years ago, the climate in Europe began to deteriorate rapidly. Central Europe became colder, drier, and lost much of the tree cover that had once supported large herds of deer, elk, and other important prey animals. Neandertals retreated from much of teh northern part of their geographic range to move south, where the climate (and hunting) was better. The younger, formerly-accepted dates for the flutes suggested that modern humans came along after things got bad, moving into a landscape largely empty of hominids. Now we know that is not true.
Tom Higham says, "Modern humans...were in central Europe at least 2,000 to 3,000 years before this climatic deterioration, when huge icebergs calved from ice sheets in the northern Atlantic and temperatures plummeted." In other words, modern humans were in the region when times were good, along with Neandertals. When the dramatic downturn began, Neandertals were unable to adjust and moved out, while modern humans stayed on and thrived.
Music surely can't be seen as the cause of modern human survival and lack of music can't be blamed for Neandertal extinctions. Nonetheless, using music as well as art to transmit crucial information for survival -- facts about prey animals, their habits, their behaviors, postures, and mating -- would help embed that information in one's memory. Faced with a deteriorating climate, modern humans may have retained and drawn upon a wealth of knowledge not as readily available to Neandertals.
Of maybe modern humans just liked making love to music and so made more babies than Neandertals.
