35,000-Year-Old Flute Is Oldest Music Instrument Ever Found 139
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by
timothy
from the old-earth-theory dept.
from the old-earth-theory dept.
Omomyid writes "The AFP is reporting the discovery of a 35,000 year-old flute, made from a vulture wing bone. The context described makes it sound like a musician's shop. There were also fragments of ivory-based flutes and flint tools. Being at least 35KYO this bone flute beats the previous oldest-known musical instrument by at least 5,000 years and puts it very close to the beginning of the Aurignacian culture."
My ancestors used mammoth bones (Score:2, Informative)
But then, we got those when we rode dinosaurs with Jesus.
Mind you, it was hard lugging around a large mammoth flute.
Neanderthal invented musical instruments (Score:5, Informative)
It is the oldest for the Homo sapiens, but there were flutes found on Neanderthal sites, much older flutes.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/376813/neanderthal_flute_the_oldest_musical.html
Re:This one time (Score:3, Informative)
Come on, this far in and there have been absolutely know "playing the bone flute" jokes?
Re:Interesting! (Score:4, Informative)
There's little reason to believe that our ancestors, going quite far back, had any less inherent intellectual, cultural or social capacity than us. (Other than what we might have from superior nutrition, health, etc. See Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel for that...)
Jared's "The Third Chimpanzee" goes about how humans branched off and took a separate path from the "other chimps". In it he also goes speculates about how and when we took our great leap forward.
While Guns Germs and Steel seemed a more insightful book, The Third Chimpanzee goes exactly about the evolutionary differentiation that made us, how different (or not) we are from chimps and other mammals, and about the plausible evolutionary explanations for these differences.
Re:Is it april 1st again already? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Interesting! (Score:1, Informative)
And I'm a neuroscientist who has focussed on the hearing mechanism and music perception.
The phenomenon of music perception (distinguishing between sustained pitches and transient noise) is pathologically based; it is a by-product of the hearing mechanism's construction. And not only do vibrating strings or columns of air have harmonic overtones, but even pure tones will resonate in the cochlea at the harmonic frequencies (e.g.: a 200Hz pure tone will also activate the neurons associated with 400Hz and 600Hz). The synchronicity between the firing patterns in the cochlea due to overlapping harmonics (a 200Hz tone and a 300Hz tone will share a harmonic at 600Hz, for example) indicate the level of consonance, which is why a perfect 5th sounds more consonant than a minor 2nd or an augmented 4th. The experience of consonance/dissonance is entirely pathologically based. Our preference for these chords is more complicated and emotional and can change over time, but in general, we prefer consonant intervals.
The point being, our hearing mechanism (which has remained relatively unchanged for most likely hundreds of thousands of years) chose the intervals we prefer and led to the development of the pentatonic scale through trial-and-error based on which intervals sounded "better", not due to an understanding of the ratios involved. Humans have been making music long before Pythagoras, even using non-pentatonic scales.
I am not trying to brush off this find -- I think it is wonderful -- but I am not at all surprised that people 35,000 years ago were using the pentatonic scale, because our gravitation towards the pentatonic scale is based solely on biology and immutable physical properties.
For an easy-to-digest discussion of this, I recommend "How We Hear Music" by James Beament.