Listen to the Music Made With the Neanderthal Flute
Regina Sienra
Regina Sienra
Quote:In a 1997 essay, musicologist Bob Fink pointed out that the flute had major implications regarding the evolution of musical scales. Fink also assessed that the line-up of the holes confirmed that it was indeed a flute, and the holes matched four notes of a diatonic scale—do, re, mi, fa. The distance between the openings is related to a whole tone and a half-tone somewhere within a scale. “These three notes on the Neanderthal bone flute are inescapably diatonic and will sound like a near-perfect fit within ANY kind of standard diatonic scale, modern or antique,” states Fink. “We simply cannot conceive of it being otherwise, unless we deny it is a flute at all.”
In 2011, Ljuben Dimkaroski, a trumpet player for the Ljubljana Opera Orchestra, was looking for a definitive, practical answer and got his hands on a clay replica of the flute. After some thinking on how to play it, the trumpet player found a way, as it was not comparable to modern wind instruments. The results were documented in a short film by Sašo Niskač, where Dimkaroski plays a selection of Slovenian traditional songs as well as Beethoven's “Ode to Joy, and Maurice Ravel's “Bolero, Maurice Ravel. The musician also included free improvisation and mimicked animal sounds.
“Together with some other findings from Divje babe I, the Mousterian musical instrument offers a unique insight into the Neanderthals’ symbolic behaviour and their cognitive abilities,” write Turk and Dimkaroski in a study—challenging the notions of the Neanderthal may have achieved before their extinction.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
- Bertrand Russell