The Magic Flutes
by Heather Pringle
June 26, 2009
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. (For more on this controversial figurine, see my earlier blog posting at http://archive.archaeology.org/blog/?p=501)
Taken together, these new finds strongly support what many Paleolithic archaeologists have suspected for years—namely that music-making and sculpting in three dimensions emerged and flowered at virtually the same time in human history. Not far from Hohle Fels, for example, University of Tübingen archaeologists found three similar flutes (one of mammoth ivory, and two carved from swan bones) in a mountain cave. These instruments dated to approximately 35,000 years ago, and were thought to be contemporaneous with several small carved figurines from the same cave complex. Now the finds at Hohle Fels seem to be firmly nailing down that connection between very early music and sculpture.
So what does it all mean? I had a great email yesterday on this very subject from Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania, who wrote a superb paper a few years back on prehistoric European and East Asian flutes. Mair, one of the most perceptive archeological thinkers around, calls the discovery of the world’s earliest musical instrument and the earliest known figurative sculpture in the same cave “mind-boggling.†He then goes on to add that “the quantum leap in human artistic and esthetic abilities in one place [my  italics] at such an early date begs for some sort of explanation.â€
Many researchers have suggested that the emergence of modern human behavior some 40,000 to 50,000 years ago was sparked by expansions or rewiring in our spongy, three-pound brain which permitted the development of modern languages. But these amazing new finds from Germany, all from a region near the banks of the Danube River,  an ancient migration route, add a fascinating new geographical factor to the puzzle. Why did this great leap forward in art and music apparently  happen there?
We certainly haven’t heard the end of Hohle Fels. Â Indeed, Â I think we are all going to reading much more about the discoveries there in years to come.
The photo of the flute is by H. Jenson, Â copyright: Â Universitat Tubingen
Comments posted here do not represent the views or policies of the Archaeological Institute of America.
Heather Pringle is a freelance science journalist who has been writing about archaeology for more than 20 years. She is the author of Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust and The Mummy Congress: Science, Obsession, and the Everlasting Dead. For more about Heather, see our 
