Bart Hopkin AIR COLUMNS and TONE HOLES skin#

While music probably had a lot to do with the development of language in humans, I see no evidence that music gave us the idea to start farming. As I describe what happens to music as it becomes more “civilized,” please understand that I do not believe that modern civilization constitutes an “advance” in human culture in any way, over any other way of life. I think that this is an important point to make here. We have plenty of evidence that indigenous people incorporate music into their culture in ways that civilized people simply do not understand.

In Australia, some cultures use music to connect their cultural history to the geography of the land in a way that allows them to navigate long distances, by song. Many cultures use music for ribald celebrations, but also for sacred rituals and magic. Many cultures use music for healing and for medicine. Nobody makes war quite like we do, but lots of cultures make music for it.

Many cultures, including ours, use music for war. Music entwined itself into these cultures in many different ways. The song and the dance were not different things. For tens of thousands of years, thousands of distinctly different ancestral cultures each developed their own musical tradition, along with their own instruments and scales, for their own purposes.įor indigenous people, and for our ancient ancestors, music was simply the audible portion of their culture. However, they have found that the music of indigenous people around the world varies widely, and that different cultures use music in very different ways and for different purposes. Anthropologists have not found any indigenous cultures which do not incorporate music. In those days, however, people made music with whatever sounds they could make, and they must have thought about music differently that we do today.

Today, we can, pretty accurately, recreate the sounds of those early instruments because we understand the physics of sound and have made careful replicas of these early instruments.

Bart Hopkin AIR COLUMNS and TONE HOLES skin#

We will probably never know whether these flutes were played as solo instruments, or what other instruments may have accompanied them, because instruments made of wood, skin or plant material would not have survived the eons, but we can tell what key they played in, and what their scale sounded like. Here we see the earliest incontrovertible evidence of music in humans, and it predates the earliest evidence of language by many thousands of years. Among those very early artifacts, however, archeologists in Europe have unearthed several bone flutes that they estimate to be about 40,000 years old, give or take a millennium or two. I say “speculate” because very little of those ancient human cultures has survived the ravages of time, so we paint the portraits of these ancestors from the pile of stone tools we’ve recovered, some skeletons, and a few carvings, sculptures and cave paintings. Scientists speculate that music preceded language in our early human ancestors, and that singing together in groups may have spawned the development of the earliest human language.