June 26, 2009--Savage Beasts
The New York Times reported yesterday that a 35,000-year-old bone flute was found by archeologists in a cave in remote southwestern Germany. (Article linked below).
This is shortly after homo sapiens arrived in what is now Europe after journeying there from Africa where early humans originated. The preserved portion of the flute, which was carved from a hollow bone from a griffon vulture, is a fragment 8.5 inches long and includes four remaining finger holes. A fifth one is missing. Researchers made a wooden replica and say that when they play it, it produces tones that are comparable to those from modern flutes.
Friedrich Seeberer, a German specialist in ancient music who fabricated the reproduction says “The tones are quite harmonic.” This inspired the flutes discoverer, Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen to note that southern Germany “may have been one of the places where human culture originated.”
Other archeologists when learning of the discovery noted that they can “only speculate” about why these early Europeans were motivated to make music.
I suspect that these scientists who are puzzled as to why these distant ancestors would bother with music when their very survival was at stake are wondering about how it contributed to making homo sapiens more likely to survive. Doesn’t evolutionary theory teach that only physical or psychological characteristics that are essential to survival would be naturally selected? Why then would the capacity to make music become an evolved trait? How does something so seemingly impractical help our species survive?
If anything, wouldn’t ancient man huddled around the fire in a German cave 35,000 or more years ago listening to the flute maker playing some haunting tune, wouldn’t they have been lulled into a passive reverie which would have made them vulnerable to the attack of, say, a griffon vulture? Or some enemy clan? Why then did this impulse to make and be captivated by music evolve so universally? Isn’t it true that every culture through all of human history developed one way or another to produce music? It appears as widespread as the development of teeth.
Teeth and music? It is a puzzlement.
A couple of thoughts. First, where was this early flute found? In a cave in one of the starkest regions of Germany. Even remote by today’s standards. Perhaps homo sapiens, of course used to starkness, especially in winter—and 35,000 years ago was at the end of the next to last ice age—needed music almost as much as their teeth to help them get through long and still frigid nights.
Is it too much to imagine that after the hunt, back in the cave, to help them ease into sleep or to bond them with their kinsmen or induce them to participate in some fertility rite, the plaintive sounds of the bone flute, in the words of one Dr. Conard, “could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks and thereby perhaps have facilitated the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans.”
Or to make life worth living? To suggest that existence is not all about hunting and striving and killing?
Back at the cave after a week of hunting wooly mammoths or at Carnegie Hall after a week of making a killing on Wall Street, that music not only soothes the savage beast but also contributes to making that beast human?
Thus I suspect that according to out-of-Africa theory when 2,000 generations ago homo sapiens left the land where they emerged they not only brought with them their spears but also, thankfully, their flutes.
This is shortly after homo sapiens arrived in what is now Europe after journeying there from Africa where early humans originated. The preserved portion of the flute, which was carved from a hollow bone from a griffon vulture, is a fragment 8.5 inches long and includes four remaining finger holes. A fifth one is missing. Researchers made a wooden replica and say that when they play it, it produces tones that are comparable to those from modern flutes.
Friedrich Seeberer, a German specialist in ancient music who fabricated the reproduction says “The tones are quite harmonic.” This inspired the flutes discoverer, Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen to note that southern Germany “may have been one of the places where human culture originated.”
Other archeologists when learning of the discovery noted that they can “only speculate” about why these early Europeans were motivated to make music.
I suspect that these scientists who are puzzled as to why these distant ancestors would bother with music when their very survival was at stake are wondering about how it contributed to making homo sapiens more likely to survive. Doesn’t evolutionary theory teach that only physical or psychological characteristics that are essential to survival would be naturally selected? Why then would the capacity to make music become an evolved trait? How does something so seemingly impractical help our species survive?
If anything, wouldn’t ancient man huddled around the fire in a German cave 35,000 or more years ago listening to the flute maker playing some haunting tune, wouldn’t they have been lulled into a passive reverie which would have made them vulnerable to the attack of, say, a griffon vulture? Or some enemy clan? Why then did this impulse to make and be captivated by music evolve so universally? Isn’t it true that every culture through all of human history developed one way or another to produce music? It appears as widespread as the development of teeth.
Teeth and music? It is a puzzlement.
A couple of thoughts. First, where was this early flute found? In a cave in one of the starkest regions of Germany. Even remote by today’s standards. Perhaps homo sapiens, of course used to starkness, especially in winter—and 35,000 years ago was at the end of the next to last ice age—needed music almost as much as their teeth to help them get through long and still frigid nights.
Is it too much to imagine that after the hunt, back in the cave, to help them ease into sleep or to bond them with their kinsmen or induce them to participate in some fertility rite, the plaintive sounds of the bone flute, in the words of one Dr. Conard, “could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks and thereby perhaps have facilitated the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans.”
Or to make life worth living? To suggest that existence is not all about hunting and striving and killing?
Back at the cave after a week of hunting wooly mammoths or at Carnegie Hall after a week of making a killing on Wall Street, that music not only soothes the savage beast but also contributes to making that beast human?
Thus I suspect that according to out-of-Africa theory when 2,000 generations ago homo sapiens left the land where they emerged they not only brought with them their spears but also, thankfully, their flutes.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
6:47 AM
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