Flutes offer clues to Stone-Age music
Jun 25th, 2009
From the New York Times: Flutes Offer Clues to Stone-Age Music.
At least 35,000 years ago, in the depths of the last ice age, the sound of music filled a cave in what is now southwestern Germany, the same place and time early Homo sapiens were also carving the oldest known examples of figurative art in the world.
Scientists say that this bone flute, [continue]
Thanks to Peter B. Nelson (from Pine Island, MN) for telling me about this article.
It just blows me away that these recently found flutes are nearly 40,000 years old (when we think of historical times in comparison), dating to the initial settlement of the region.” Not just a natural object, not with the spacing of the holes to product tonalities, along with an abundance of stone and ivory artifacts, flint-knapping debris and bones of hunted animals in the same area.
What I want to know (and the article didn’t say) is what kind of musical scale is implied by the flute. Do its intervals coincide with our modern Western scale, any other known scales, or just the scale that resulted from more-or-less evenly spacing the holes?