Posted on 06/25/2009 12:40:34 AM PDT by james500
We all knew that Stone Age humans were hunters and gatherers. But sculptors and flutists?
Archeologists said yesterday that they had unearthed the oldest musical instruments ever found - several flutes that inhabitants of southwestern Germany laboriously carved from bone and ivory at least 35,000 years ago.
The find suggests just how integral artistic expression may be to human existence: Music apparently flourished even in prehistoric days when mere survival was a full-time endeavor.
Fragments of the instruments were found in a cave, amid bones from bears and mammoths and flakes of flint from a prehistoric tool shop.
There were certainly, you know, the Michelangelos back then, who were the highly talented people for carving masterpieces. But the Michelangelos also had to hunt and butcher and chip stones and do all sorts of things, said Nicholas Conard, professor of early prehis tory at the University of Tübingen, who led the work described in the journal Nature yesterday.
The discovery is the latest in a string of archeological finds - including a sculpted female nude - which reveal that even tens of thousands of years ago humans had a sophisticated cultural and artistic life.
...
There is something analogous to a cultural arms race between the [Neanderthals] and the moderns, said Conard. Neanderthals had perfectly good behavioral strategies, but tended to be culturally more conservative, and modern humans were more flexible and creative.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Flautist.
I was thinking along the same lines, but of the flutes being a means to coordinate the hunt - think of a boatswains pipe.. Music could easily have evolved from that activity.
It might have been a really bad attempt to make a wheel.
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