Sounds Wild and Broken, page 21
Musical instruments, then, did not originate as ornaments for well-off aesthetes whose material needs had been met. Instead, people living arduous and undoubtedly insecure lives gave the world the first known instrumental music. When our modern schools cut music programs, polemicists from the left and right argue that art is decadent or an excess to be trimmed, and academics dismiss music as fundamentally unnecessary to human culture, they might look back to finely crafted flutes from ice age caves and reconsider.
I sit with the flutes in the museum room for a few hours. Twenty people pass through. Three look at the flutes. The others hurry straight to the wall of buttons, each one provoking from a loudspeaker a brief melody from a reconstructed flute. To my consternation, the objects themselves elicit little visible wonder or interest.
To be fair, the flutes have competition. The museum is also home to exquisite carved figurines. Wild horses with nostrils flaring, birds diving with wings folded, lion people standing erect, dozens more, all evoked by hands that knew how to imbue thumb-sized pieces of tooth or bone with the living presence of animals. Instrumental music was not the only human art preserved in these caves. The patient brushes and delicate probes of archaeologists have excavated dozens of carved animals and human-lion hybrid forms. The cave sediments contain bodily ornaments too: ivory and antler pendants and beads. The inhabitants of these caves were creative people, transforming everyday bone and ivory into what we now call art.
The most famous of the sculptures is just down the museum hallway from the flute displays. It has its own room, a dark space with one illuminated object at its center. Every visitor here has likely seen its photograph in news reports or museum videos, posters, and websites. No wonder visitors tend to hurry past the flutes. We’re in a museum whose narrative builds toward a hallowed object.
On a plinth stands an impressively plump female human figure. Instead of a head, the ivory carving has a small ring, delicately worked. This ring presumably received a cord, and the palm-sized figurine, six centimeters tall, served as a pendant or amulet. Polish from such a cord is still visible within the eye of the ring. The figure’s limbs are short and part of the left arm is missing. Breasts, buttocks, and vulva are swollen and slightly lopsided. The waist is pinched and the belly flat. The hands are finely rendered, resting above her hips. Incised lines run across the figure, perhaps suggesting a wrap or other covering, although sculptures from this era of nonhuman animals are often also decorated with similar surface markings.
The object is named in the museum and the technical literature as a Venus, like the figurines from other caves, such as the famous Venus of Willendorf unearthed in 1908. These other Venus Paleolithic female figures are at least five thousand years younger, and so the connection to the one here in this museum is distant at best. To modern eyes, the figure appears to emphasize sexuality. But the meaning for Paleolithic peoples is unknown. Religion, protest, porn, humor, selfie, game piece, toy, portrait, artisanal training exercise, supplication, or gift? We have insufficient context with which to judge. Projecting the name of a two-thousand-year-old Roman god, Venus, back nearly forty millennia reveals more about our culture than it does about the intentions of the ancients.
People gather in the darkness around the illuminated figurine. This carved mammoth ivory is the oldest known figurative sculpture in the world. Until the discovery in 2019 of a nearly forty-four-thousand-year-old cave painting in Sulawesi, an Indonesian island east of Borneo, the figurine was the oldest known figurative art of any kind.
In the cave, the figurine was buried three meters below the present-day surface. It lay an easy arm’s reach from the griffon vulture flute, in the same layer of cave sediment. In archaeology, layers of sediment are records of passing time, each passing century adding its film of dust and detritus. The laminations of dust tell us that the flute and the figurine were contemporaries.
How old are the flutes? Carbon dating suggests at least thirty-five thousand years old for the griffon vulture flute and the more fragmented mammoth flutes. The more complete mammoth flute and the swan radius may be as old as thirty-nine thousand. The lowest layer containing the debris of human settlement is just over forty-two thousand years old. These dates are confirmed by both the radioactive decay of carbon and time-sensitive changes in crystals trapped inside buried animal teeth. New techniques may, in future, further refine the dates. Likely these German caves were not the only places in which instrumental music loosed its early notes to the world. Any instruments made of wood or reed decayed into forgotten oblivion long ago. Or they wait buried in places yet to be excavated. For now, though, these German caves yield the earliest physical evidence.
Human music is older than any instrument. Our voices surely played with melody, harmony, and rhythms long before we carved any tusk or bone. People in all contemporary human societies sing, play music, and dance. This universality suggests that our ancestors, too, were musical beings, long before some of them invented musical instruments. Today, across known human cultures, music emerges in similar contexts: love, lullaby, healing, and dance. For humans, then, social behavior is often mediated by music.
Fossil evidence also shows that ancestors five hundred thousand years ago possessed hyoid bones that would enable modern-sounding speech and song. Human throats thus had the capacity to utter spoken and sung words hundreds of thousands of years before we manufactured musical instruments.
Whether speech or music came first is, at present, unknowable. The neurological prerequisites for the perception of both speech and music are present in other species, suggesting that our linguistic and musical capacities were elaborations of preexisting qualities. Like humans listening to the spoken word, other mammals process the sounds of their own species mostly in the left hemisphere of the brain. Other sounds go to the right, the primary locus of human musical processing, or are shared between the two hemispheres. The left brain uses subtle differences in the timing of sounds to understand semantics and syntax. The right brain uses differences in frequency spectra to grasp melodic and timbral content. But this division is not absolute, suggesting that no firm line separates speech and music. The intonations and prosody of language activate the right, but the semantic content of sung music lights up the left. Sung music and poetical language, then, braid the operations of our two hemispheres. We hear this in the form of music across human cultures: all incorporate words into song, and the meanings of all spoken languages emerge partly from their musical qualities. As babies, we recognize our mother by the pacing and pitch contours of her voice. As adults, we communicate emotion and meaning through changes in pitch, timing, vigor, timbre, and tone. As cultures, we pass down our most precious knowledge through a union of music and language: Australian song lines; Middle Eastern and European cantillations, hymns, and psalms; the San’s “calling narratives” during trance dancing; and the many manifestations of chant in societies worldwide.
Instrumental music, then, has a special quality that separates it from both song and spoken language. It is a form of music entirely free of language. The first flute makers, perhaps, discovered how to make music that transcends the particularity of words. In this they were possibly finding kinship with nonhuman animal species—for insects, birds, frogs, and others, sonic expression, of course, exists outside the framework of human language, although each species may have its own forms of grammar and syntax. If instrumental music does allow us to experience sound in ways analogous to the experiences of nonhuman animals, it is a paradoxical experience. Through tool use—manufacturing musical instruments, a recent and uniquely human activity—we experience sound as animal kin may still do, and prehuman ancestors surely also did, as a sonic experience full of meaning and nuance beyond and before human words. Instrumental music perhaps returns our senses to an experience that predates tools and language.
Percussive forms of music, too, may be older than speech or song. Given that drumming often uses fragile and rapidly decaying everyday objects such as pieces of skin or wood, the archaeological evidence is scant. The earliest known drums are only six thousand years old, from China, but it seems likely that human drumming is much older. In Africa, wild chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas all use drumming as a social signal. These ape cousins use hands, feet, and stones to beat against other body parts, the ground, or tree buttresses. This suggests that our ancestors, too, may have been drummers, perhaps communicating identity and territoriality, as well as drawing social groups into cooperative, rhythmic unison. Compared with other great apes, human drumming has a more regular and precise beat. Intriguingly, for many chimpanzee populations, beating rocks against trees has a ritual component. The chimpanzees focus their efforts on particular trees, resulting in an accumulation of stones at each site. Chimpanzees don’t merely deposit the stones; they toss or hurl them to produce a boom or clatter from the tree. Often, as they thump the stone against the tree, they also give the loud pant hoot vocalization and bang on the tree trunk with their hands and feet. Both chimpanzees and humans, then, unite percussive sounds, vocalization, social display, and ritual. This suggests that these elements of human music existed before the origin of our species.
The exact timing of the growth of the deepest roots of human music is, for now, a mystery. But the connection between instrumental music and other forms of art is clearer. The world’s oldest known musical instruments are entombed right next to the oldest known figurative sculpture. Both come from almost the lowest layer of human deposits in the caves. Under them lie layers of sediment devoid of human presence, then, deeper, Neanderthal tools. In this part of the world, instrumental music and figurative art emerged together, as anatomically modern humans first arrived in the icy landscape of Europe.
Musical instruments share with figurative sculpture the idea that three-dimensional modification of materials can yield mobile objects that stimulate our senses, minds, and emotions, what we now call experiences of art. The juxtaposition of the flute and the figurine suggests that, in the Aurignacian, human creativity was not channeled into one activity or function. Artisanal skill, musical innovation, and representational art were connected.
Evidence of such linked forms of creativity also comes from the very earliest human art. The first known drawing is abstract, not figurative. It comes from layers seventy-three thousand years old in Blombos Cave, South Africa. There, someone used an ochre crayon to draw a cross-hatched pattern onto crumbly stone. This drawing comes from a level that also contains other evidence of creative work: shell beads, bone awls and spear points, and engraved pieces of ochre.
So far, though, the record shows that the craft of three-dimensional art objects in southern Germany may have developed at a different pace than figurative art that uses pigment. The flutes and figurines show no evidence of being specially colored. The caves in which they were found are unadorned by wall paintings. In this region it is only much later, in the Magdalenian, twenty thousand years after these flutes, that there is strong evidence of stone decoration with ochre pigments. Another European Aurignacian site, the Cave of El Castillo in northern Spain, shows a different trajectory. A wall painting of a disk dates to more than forty thousand years ago and, on the same wall, a hand stencil is more than thirty-seven thousand years old. But as yet, there are no three-dimensional artworks known of this age from this region. Likewise, the figurative paintings on cave walls in Sulawesi are not associated with any known sculptures. These differences may tell us more about the incompleteness of the archaeological record than they do about the story of human art. But for now, three-dimensional artworks—sculptures and flutes—seem to have first developed in different places and times than paintings.
This deep history reframes our experience of more recent art. Gazing at the Paleolithic flutes and figurines, I think of the crowds at the British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Louvre. We stand in line sometimes for hours to glimpse important moments in human art and culture. But here in a small museum in rural Germany we experience art’s deeper roots.
I stretch out my arms. If this span were the extent of known human musical and figurative art, the ice age flutes and carvings would sit on my left fingertips, joined by the Sulawesi cave paintings. Most of the canonical pieces of art in major museums sit on the extended fingers of my right hand, products of the last millennium. In no way does this diminish the importance of the artworks of the last few centuries. Instead, the field sites and museums that record early human artistic flourishing complement these more recent works and root the story of human creativity. Art was born in relationship with the animals and physical spaces of each region, elevated by Paleolithic human technological prowess and imagination.
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I take two vulture bones in hand. I intend to make flutes patterned on the proportions of the ancient griffon vulture flute. My bones’ original owner was a North American turkey vulture, killed on a road. Its salvaged body became part of the zoology collections at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. For Aurignacian artisans, the griffon vulture bone was likely easy to find. These birds scavenge hunters’ kills and nest near caves. Their bones are commonly found in cave deposits. But not so for swans. Their bones were specially procured, perhaps from wetlands far from the caves.
In the lab, I pluck two forearm bones, the radius and ulna, from the turkey vulture’s cardboard ossuary. They’re shorter by a third than the bones of the wide-winged griffon vulture, but have about the same shape and proportions, twice as long as my thumb and thinner than a pencil.
After an overnight soak in warm water—the bone had been stored in a dry room for a decade—I grasp the radius and bear down with a crude flint knife, sawing in an attempt to cut the bone’s head from its shaft. I made my small stone tool by bashing a hard cobblestone onto a nodule of chert, breaking away a flake. The result is very sharp, but this edge is of little use in my unskilled hands. My efforts yield little more than blurred scratch marks on the bone’s surface. Bird bone is surprisingly hard and its surface is slick. My blade slips around, even when I hold it steady with my thumbnail.
I feel embarrassed to be a descendant, as we all are, of masterful stoneworkers, yet unable to complete the simple task of lopping the end from a bird bone. My clumsiness with an unfamiliar tool is one cause. The other is the unrefined nature of my toolmaking. The cave deposits in which the flutes were found contain hundreds of stone, antler, and bone tools: daggers, scrapers, awls, scalpel-like bladelets, chisels, knives, borers, and burins. These tools were made with precision and, judging from the artwork they created, wielded with great skill. An hour or two fumbling with my primitive flake teaches me how sophisticated was their craft and rude are my attempts.
I give up and resort to a more familiar tool, the blade of a modern coping saw. With steel teeth born of mines and smelters, I cut into the bone. First one end then the other, slicing off the bulbous ends that connected elbow to shoulder. The bone is surprisingly tough. I have to press down hard on the saw blade to make the incision. Shorn of its bulky heads, the bone immediately feels different in my hand. It’s lighter and pleasantly balanced. No longer dominated by the heavy, knobby ends, its weight rests evenly throughout, easy to turn, inviting my hands to explore.
The bone absorbs heat from my fingers and takes on a mild, welcoming glow. I feel paradoxical animacy in this eagerness to absorb and emit warmth in the remains of a dead vulture. The surface is smooth but variably so. There is a slight roughness on one face, like a sprinkling of dusty sand. Some fine ridges run lengthwise. One of these diverges into two, creating a facet. The bone speaks readily to my hands, quickly revealing details that my eye passes over. The most delightful feature is the curvature, a suggestion of an S, more bowed at the elbow end than the wrist. The two ends differ in cross section. An irregular pentagon at the elbow end, a clean D at the wrist.
My hands twirl and stroke. They interlace the bone between fingers and squeeze gently, then harder. A springy yield but no hint of brittleness. I rest the bone on my palm and bob up and down, feeling its slightness as a surprising absence. Hands beckon my mind into the vulture’s flight. We’re both creatures of bone and muscle, possessing bodily understanding of what it means to move, to exert force on the ground and air. This kinship is the common language that my hands understand. But what they learn is shockingly alien. The impossibly light bone startles my earthbound mammalian body. This is what it takes to fly, my hands exclaim, this awesome weightless strength. Reliving in memory and recounting the experience later, I recoil, not trusting ecstatic claims to knowledge coming from mere hands. The seat of the mind is up here, in the cranium, I insist. But I cross the room and open the vulture box. There the bones lie, and, yes, I exult in holding them once again. My hands are given another taste of how the air lovers fly.
No exultation, though, when I lift the bone to my lips.
At first, all I get is the coarse whoosh of a stream of air hitting an obstacle, like blowing on the end of a pencil. I play with the angle of the cut bone end against my pursed lips, seeking that sweet spot where flowing air finds the flute edge and resolves into a clear sound. The turkey-vulture bone is frustratingly thin, skinnier than a drinking straw, and my lips feel like clumsy pillows against its narrow end. All I get is breathy noise. Not exactly a moving evocation of the dawn of instrumental music.
