[HN Gopher] Neanderthal Flute
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Neanderthal Flute
Author : mooreds
Score : 56 points
Date : 2023-05-25 21:42 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nms.si)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nms.si)
| piwi wrote:
| Some people think it is a hyena who punctured the bone, and that
| it is not from neanderthal.
|
| Search Divje Babe in
| https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.140...
|
| It is amazing to see how much work is spent collecting pieces of
| evidence.
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| asdff wrote:
| One would think a blade of grass would be even older than the
| flute. Kids sometimes pick up grass whistling intuitively but its
| also something that is culturally passed down over the years at
| the playground, and might be quite old.
| ilyt wrote:
| Or just hitting something with a stick to drum
| jacurtis wrote:
| After watching the video, it seems that they are distinguishing
| it by the fact that it was a man-made object created for the
| specific purpose of producing music. This of course still
| allows for other pre-existing natural objects to be used for
| music playing.
|
| For example, I assume prior to creating a flute, human
| ancestors likely batted rocks together or beat rocks against
| hollow logs to create a beat or variants of music.
|
| But the significance of this finding is that it was purpose-
| made for creating music, which is interesting since it hints at
| the cultural impact that music may have played 60,000+ years
| ago.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| That reminds me, tangentially, of The Song of the Reed, by
| Rumi.
|
| http://www.dar-al-masnavi.org/n-I-0001.html#1
|
| (think of the 3 meanings of reed: an instrument turning human
| breath (life) into music, a writing tool (qalam), and of course
| a living creature itself)
| 100k wrote:
| Amazing, hearing it played sends chills down my spine.
|
| It's not as old, but in Wernor Herzog's documentary "Cave of
| Forgotten Dreams", an archeologist plays a 30,000 year old
| vulture bone flute. It even uses the pentatonic scale!
|
| Some links about it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUCBBDV2Tzk
| https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2011/flute-of-forgotten-dreams/
| https://www.npr.org/2009/06/24/105823127/a-little-flute-musi...
| mooreds wrote:
| You can see the flute played here:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3agcq7fSGC8
| QuercusMax wrote:
| This video is all about the flute music without all the
| interesting sciency stuff:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHy9FOblt7Y
| dhosek wrote:
| The thing that's impressive to me is that it has the holes for
| controlling pitch. The reconstruction offers some guesses at the
| temperament, but I imagine there's a lot of room for error.
| Presumably there are other instruments even older (it's likely
| that the very first instruments would be percussion instruments
| which, even should they survive, would be difficult to identify
| as musical instruments tens of thousands of years later.
| dheera wrote:
| > lot of room for error
|
| I mean, when you have all day and nothing to do sitting around
| in your cave, you can make a lot of flutes and hopefully one
| will be error-free.
| [deleted]
| QuercusMax wrote:
| The first percussion instruments were almost certainly either
| rocks or sticks banged together. The sticks were presumably
| used just like claves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claves).
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