The Flute; Expanded

I was watching Cave of Forgotten Dreams last night, when the talk changed from cave drawings to paleolithic tools.  This was when I first found out about paleolithic flutes, and particularly the oldest one ever found.  The flute was carved from vulture bone, and was also found in the workshop of some paleolithic Da Vinci.  Carbon dating all the tools and pieces of art in the are gives evidence that the flute is 40,000 years old.

Made by a Master

The flute itself is a 5 hole flute.  The cool thing about this flute is that it is not only the oldest undisputed flute as of the movie, it is not just a simple hollow tube with holes.  This flute was the making of an artisan.  There are notches all along the sides.  The reason for this is that the bone was cut in half, long ways, and hollowed out using stone tools.  This, using the notches as a guide, the two pieces were put back together and sealed with an air tight sealant, perhaps a primitive animal glue.

The Sound

The flute was created with only the thought to sound pleasing to the ear of the maker.  The 5 holes do have markings, but it is believed these markings are just guidelines from the artisan, rather than a "known" system of flute making.  The closest approximation to modern instruments is that it is a Pentatonic based note pattern, instead of a chromatic or diatonic flute.

Some Time

To put this in perspective for myself, I looked up a few known facts about something made so far back.  When this flute was made, there were lots of animals that no longer roam the Earth.  The big cats; Sabertooth tigers and Cave Lion, were still alive and well known to the maker.  Tribes related to the maker would soon make cave drawings of Woolly Mammoths and Cave Bears.  The world certainly did not look the same, as the English Channel was a barren, dry piece of land because there were glaciers over the alps that were many thousands of feet thick.  The flute is twice as old as potter, thirty thousand years older than the oldest known bow, and it goes without saying that it pre-dates written languages, walled cities, and when this flute was made wheat was nothing but a wild grass.

Audience

Another animal that was still around when this flute was made was the Neanderthal.  It is virtually impossible that Neanderthal man did not have contact with homo sapiens of this era.  We can only speculate if it was peaceful or horrendous.  There is possibility that Neanderthals have heard us make our music with our instruments.  It is impossible for us to know if Neanderthals had their own music, but evidence suggests that if they did, it was voice or percussion based.  One of the distinguishing features of Humans is that our paleolithic sites have tools and art created out of bone, while Neanderthals have no such trinkets at their sites.  Therefore, one of the distinguishing features of modern humans compared to the neanderthals that died out is that we have complex music, and they did not.

Using tools to make music is a heritage of all humanity.