Try to imagine, if you can, what modern civilization would be like without music. There would be no Miles Davis or Charlie Mingus, no Mozart or Mahler, no Black Eyed Peas or Beyonce, Chinese opera or gamelan, no movie scores, no folk festivals, no Billboard charts, no iPod, no Rolling Stone concerts, no ringtones. And, on a far more modest scale, there would be no blog in this space each week, as I always plunk a headset on as I begin composing my thoughts. The soundtrack for this blog is Hans Zimmer’s The Last Samurai.
Without music, our world would be a sad, impoverished place, a truism that crossed my mind this week as I read of the latest discovery at Hohle Fels Cave in Germany. There, in one of the lower layers, University of Tübingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard and his colleagues unearthed a bone flute securely dated to at least 35,000 years ago, and perhaps as much as 40,000 years ago. The 8-inch-long instrument, carved from the bone of a griffon vulture, lay in a thin archaeological layer less than three feet away from a Venus figurine that made headlines around the world last month.
Archaeology for more