Science / Medicine : The Oldest Oldies: Caveman Music : Instruments made of bone or stone have been copied and used to create rhythms believed similar to those of prehistoric times. Researchers increasingly believe music played a major part in bringing humans of that era together.
The caves of Lascaux in France are closed to tourists, to protect the vivid but delicate paintings of bison, horses and antelope that early artists had fashioned during the Ice Age.
But researchers can still gain access, and among them is Jelle Atema of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. Atema’s venture into the caves was somewhat different than what one might expect of a scientific expedition; it might be called spiritual, even mystical. But it was definitely musical.
He brought with him a copy of a flute, such as those ancient cave-dwellers might have heard. The original, dated at between 20,000 and 40,000 years old and actually used in those times, is in the British Museum.
“We set up by candlelight,” he remembers. “We walked in at dark, feeling our way through, until we arrived in the central chamber. The candles gave the kind of lighting that our ancestors probably experienced.” There, for 15 minutes, he played his flute. “It was a mystical experience,” he said. “Sharp high notes reverberating in the dark. There were tears in our eyes.”
This combination of primordial music and ancient art offers a relatively new direction in the study of anthropology: the origin of human culture. Such origins have been studied from perspectives offered by weapons, burial arrangements, paintings and carvings.
Now a new topic is gaining attention: the instruments that early humans could have used to create music and rhythm. Researchers increasingly believe that music played an integral part in bringing together humans of that time in what may have been a forerunner to more organized spiritual and religious gatherings.
The search for such instruments has featured the same problem that recurs throughout all studies of ancient humans: a paucity of fossil evidence. The usual procedure has been to find a few remains and then to draw sweeping conclusions. As John Reader, author of “Missing Links: The Hunt for Earliest Man,” notes, the whole of human evolution has been inferred from no more bones and skeletons than would fit on a pool table. Even so, the few instruments found thus far suffice to stimulate speculations about their diversity and significance.
Atema’s flute, for instance, is in a category of instruments that includes single-note whistles. They all are made from hollow lengths of bird bone, but the whistles have only one hole, while the flutes can have four or even six. Alexander Marshack of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum noted that “if you have several whistles and each whistle has a different sound, you can go from one person to another and create a whole series of melodies.”
As for the flutes, one of the best examples is the one at the British Museum. It is a six-hole version, five inches long, and it served as the model for Atema’s instrument. Mark Newcomer, a staff member at that museum, had made a copy of it, hoping that experts could play it and thereby learn more about the musical abilities of people at that time.
But he found that people couldn’t play it. Atema took this as a challenge; in his words, “I pride myself in making noise out of anything that looks like a flute.” Even so, it took him a year to figure it out.
After studying the original in London, Atema determined that Newcomer had made a mistake in making the copy by leaving out a small piece. Atema then carved a new copy of the flute from a deer bone. The result, he said, is “a flute anyone can play.” You would play it in the manner of a clarinet, not a fife. “It has a range of an octave and a half. It’s easy to play and difficult to make.”
It thus represents a fairly advanced design that most likely evolved through a long period of development. This means that there must have been earlier and more primitive flutes, at much more ancient times. While the British Museum instrument dates 20,000 to 40,000 years ago, Atema says, “early man probably played flute a hundred thousand years ago.” These early versions, however, have not been found. Perhaps they were of wood or reed, which would decay, rather than of durable bone.
Still, other archeologists have found further additions to the caveman band. A Soviet investigator, Sergei Bibikov, was digging in Ukraine in the late 1960s when his group found a number of mammoth bones from about 15,000 years ago. These included a shoulder blade, a thigh bone, two jaws, a pair of rattles made from ivory, a bracelet and a mallet of reindeer antler. They were painted with red markings, and the bones showed fractures from having been hit hard.
Bibikov decided that they had been used as a Stone Age version of drums, with the bracelet having served as castanets. To test this idea, he invited a Kiev jazz group to come up with a composition based on the rhythmic patterns and melodies of peoples in Russia’s far north. He then provided them with other mammoth bones and arranged for them to make a recording.
“It’s a nice rhythmic sound,” said Olga Soffer, a colleague of Bibikov who is at the University of Illinois. “When you go across the teeth in a jawbone, you get a rasping sound, like playing the washboard in a Kentucky jug band. By varying the rhythm you can sort of get something interesting going.” She describes the sound not as heavy metal but as “heavy bone,” and adds that the Kiev musicians are “the only recorded mammoth-bone quartet in existence.”
But the people of those ancient eras had more than drums and flutes. There were lithophones, amounting to xylophones made of stone. At UC Berkeley, archeologist Margaret Conkey recalls that in 1989, “I was going through some of the caves in France with the director of antiquities for the local region. He picked up all sorts of pieces of stalactites and stalagmites and banged them on the edges. They sound intriguing, and many of them do look like they’ve been deliberately broken off.”
At the American Museum of Natural History in New York, researcher Ian Tatersall recalls that at another site, “a number of large flint blades, 8 to 12 inches long, were found lying parallel and next to each other.” They looked like a xylophone.
Marshack emphasized that what has been found so far is no more than the tip of the iceberg. “The chances are, the first flute was not the first music,” he asserted. “There was clapping, stamping of feet, singing, beating sticks, playing flutes of wood.” There could have been “drums made of gourds or skins,” which would have long since decayed. “If you clap your hands,” he added, “you have rhythm.”
Why would those early people have put so much emphasis on making music? John Pfeiffer, who has written extensively on the origins of culture, believes that the music was part of rituals carried out in caves, with the purpose of binding people together into clans and other social groups.
“Ceremony was one way to foster loyalty to the clan or tribe instead of to a few blood relatives alone,” he writes. “The caves foreshadowed mosques, cathedrals, and other more recent dark, decorated places. It was there that people affirmed their common beliefs, their faith in supernatural forces.” Pfeiffer adds that “a cathedral is a cave made by man--dark, high, mysterious.”
Several European archeologists have proposed that cave art was often painted not where the walls were flat and smooth, but where the acoustics for music were best. The combination of resonating rhythms and dramatic wall paintings then would have been particularly impressive to audiences. And evidently at times they did more than just listen.
Lawrence Keeley of the University of Illinois points to excavations that “indicate some sort of dancelike movement: a group of footprints circling and circling. Most of the evidence indicates we were dealing with adolescent males or females, because the footprints aren’t as big as the general range of people.” This probably had more to do with fertility rites than with teen-agers dancing to the latest hits. Still, such evidence offers a particularly sharp view of primordial culture.
Atema, meanwhile, hopes to gain clues as to the actual nature of such paleomusic. “What did they really listen to?” he asked. “What music was in their heads?” He hopes that studies of such flutes will indicate the scales or notes that were in use, adding that to an expert flutist, “the instrument guides you.”
Certain types of music are particularly easy to play: slow, mournful tunes, bright marches and bird calls. These were what he played as he stood amid the art of the cave at Lascaux. In his words, “To be confronted not only with the visual presence of these distant ancestors, but with a ghostly acoustic presence, is a very moving experience.”
Making Prehistoric Music
Among the items that researchers believe served as musical instruments in prehistoric times:
Flutes: Made from lengths of hollow bird bones, played like a clarinet. Four- and six-hole versions have been found.
Whistles: Similar to flute, but with one hole.
Castanet: Bracelet made from bits of bone.
Drum-like instruments: Mammoth bones hit with a mallet of reindeer antler.
Rasping instrument: Mammoth jawbone with teeth. Similar to washboard in a Kentucky jug band.
Lithophones: Like xylophones but made of stone stalactites, stalagmites or large flint blades, producing characteristic sounds when struck.
Clapping, foot stamping, singing, chanting, beating sticks and gourds: All observed in preliterate cultures.
