Cave paintings in Chauvet, France (c. 35,000 BC) | Public Domain

For two million years there had been "human" species, many of them with our unique characteristics like an upright stance, bipedal locomotion, opposable thumbs, and large brains. Anatomically modern humans - our own species, homo sapiens - appeared in Africa around 150,000 years ago. However, there is no evidence that any of these homo species behaved in a distinctly human way.

Then, it seems, something strange happened. Sometime between 75,000 and 25,000 years ago, homo sapiens began to think in a completely different way than any creature that had come before. Not only did humans begin making compound tools, but decorative objects with no practical purpose at all. They began to wear not only animal skins to keep warm, but cosmetic ornaments like beads and necklaces. Ancient caves were decorated with elaborate paintings, they began to bury the dead, and we see at this time the first musical instruments.

This was a difference in kind, and not merely degree. All animals can interact with the environment in a simple stimulus-response pattern. Some very advanced animals can communicate through signal-response, using calls and displays to guide behavior. Neither of these accounts for abstract reasoning or symbolic thinking. Logical reasoning, thinking about meaning, or considering truth and beauty go beyond simply interacting with the environment. (cf. Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy, pg. 85-126.) However, it is this type of thinking that is prerequisite for art, language, literature, religion, mathematics, science, and of course, music.

If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men and begin to look at beasts and men, then you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that, being so like, they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting than the fact that, having hands, he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material for many camel's-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior one. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with images of gorgeous queens of old? No. The chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals, but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out."

Divje Babe Flute (42,000 BC)
Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Paleoanthropologists take evidence of music as one of the surest signs that humans as we know them had finally appeared. Instruments have been found in the oldest archaeological sites, showing that music has been with us since the very beginning.

The Hohle-Fels flute, discovered in Germany in 2008, for example, is over 40,000 years old. It was made by drilling holes into a vulture bone to tune it to a pentatonic scale, which is still used in music today.

Amusingly, anthropologists whose job is to study human behavior often seem strangely bewildered by basic human activity. When the Hohle-Fels Flute was discovered, one newspaper commented that “[a]rchaeologists and other scholars can only speculate as to what moved these early Europeans to make music.” Another scientist remarked that it “could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks, and thereby perhaps have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans.” After a couple of PhDs, it seems the brain can get so full that one forgets what a flute is for.

An even older flute was discovered in 1995 in the Divje Babe cave in Slovenia. This one is possibly 60,000 years old, made from the femur of a cave bear. It can still be played. Some scientists have constructed replicas and claimed that the holes are consistent with a diatonic scale, which is the kind of scale most people are familiar with. The Divje Babe cave was home to a Neanderthal camp, not homo sapiens. This leads to all sorts of interesting questions, because it’s still an open debate whether Neanderthals were even capable of triadic, symbolic thought. When the Divje Babe flute was discovered, it was broadcast around the world as a “Neanderthal flute.” On the other hand, it was also suggested that the holes in the flute are actually just teeth marks from a hyena that bit the cave bear’s leg, which would mean it isn’t even a flute at all. Another possibility is that the flute was made by homo sapiens and was dropped during a raid on the Neanderthal camp, or maybe he just lost it and a curious Neanderthal picked it up a few days later and never figured out what it was. Unfortunately, all the Neanderthals are gone, most likely wiped out 40,000 years ago by the superior weapons and industriousness of our own ancestors, so we may never know for sure.

Other instruments archaeologists have found from this period besides bone-flutes are rattles made from shells and teeth, and even percussion instruments made from deer antlers. Stones and slabs of wood were chipped to specific lengths to create musical tones. Mammoth bones with markings on the best resonance points have been found alongside flutes in Siberia. Carved stone, turtle shells, and hollow logs were once stretched with skins to create drums, and there may have been many other instruments made of less durable materials like wood or clay. Some of them may have been quite sophisticated, but those materials just don’t survive, so we don’t know anything about them. What we do know is that people back then played musical instruments, and when it comes down to it, that means they were basically the same as us.