I’m fascinated by the Stone Age, so Werner Herzog’s 3D documentary about cave paintings was catnip for me.
Here’s the trailer:
There are some more clips on the IMDB page. Herzog was inspired by this Judith Thurman article in the New Yorker.
The movie is mostly about the visual art of the Stone Age, but there’s also startling aside about Stone Age music. In a different cave from the one in the movie, they found a few flutes made from mammoth ivory, and one carved from the radius bone of a griffon vulture.
These flutes are 35,000 or 40,000 years old, making them the oldest known musical instruments (aside from the human body itself.)
In the movie, a paleontologist named Wulf Hein (no relation), dressed head to toe in reindeer leather, plays a replica of the vulture bone flute.
This ancient instrument is tuned to an unmistakeable major pentatonic scale. With a little overblowing to get the missing major scale notes, Hein is able to play the Star-Spangled Banner. Amazing. Hear an NPR story on this guy.
Every world musical culture that I know of uses pentatonic scales, but I had no idea that pentatonics were so ancient. The fact of their ancientness, and their near-ubiquity now, suggests something deeper at work than just cultural preferences. The pentatonic scale is rich in symmetry. The pitches can be arranged so they’re all a fifth apart, as they are on the diagram above. Two pitches a fifth apart have a 3/2 ratio between their respective frequencies, making it the simplest such musical ratio after the octave. The fifth also emerges out of the natural overtone series.
I doubt very much that our Stone Age ancestors explicitly knew the numerical relationships between the pitches in their music. But they didn’t stumble on pentatonic tuning by accident. The flutes show evidence of meticulous craftsmanship and must have been enormously labor-intensive to make. People in survival situations don’t work that hard without a good reason. As with the paintings, we can only speculate on what music meant to Ice Age people, but it must have meant something significant. I subscribe to the theory that music has substantial evolutionary survival value; Ice Age flutes are strong support for the idea.
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