Otherwise, we have a set of flutes from bird bone and mammoth ivory in a south German cave called Geissenkloesterle. It’s debated whether it was fashioned by Neanderthals or Cro-Magnons, and it’s been dated as far back as 60,000 years ago. In 1995 we found the Divje Babe Flute, a small instrument made from the femur of a bear in the Divje Babe park in Slovenia. There’s another distinction to be made in whether an instrument is something that can make music or something fashioned to make music, and we’d lean towards the latter since you can make a rhythm with virtually any object.įor the more sophisticated tools, they’re all invariably flutes. Now, if you’re thinking that “stick” or “rock” isn’t a suitable answer for what the first instruments were, we’re right with you. Notable examples would be Natives in the Americas or still-existing African tribes who, even having embraced modernity, continue to observe and revere the traditions of their ancestors. So how do we know all this? Much of it is conjecture based on archeological and ethnomusicological findings, of course, but even today we have cultures on this planet that still observe similar communal practices. When the earliest forms of musical sound were being formed in tribal, ritualistic settings, it’s thought that the percussion instruments were used to represent animals and other environmental threats to the species. When we say simple, we’re talking about literal rocks and sticks, and whatever else could come to hand, anything that can make a distinct, punchy sound that can be combined into a rhythm. Because of this, the earliest instruments are thought to be simple and percussion-based. The Beginnings of InstrumentsĪs we’ve mentioned, the capacity for rhythm is thought to predate melody and many of the other aspects of musical creation we’d consider nowadays. The musical sound would have evolved for four purposes, the all-important social cohesion that ensures the earliest steps of civilization can take place, simple entertainment, and dance, and then ritualistic practices that would have incorporated all three. The answer is quite simple and has some crossover with the origins of speech, that being the human drive to cooperate with one another and create the social environments where that cooperation can take place. To properly answer how music started, we need to ask why there would be a need for music. There are even arguments that it was our heightened capacity for musical creation that helped us culturally outcompete the neanderthalensis and eventually drive them to extinction.
This means they could also create music, as we sapiens have since proven and will be discussing here.
The later hominid species, mainly Homo neanderthalensis and us, the Homo sapiens, should have been able to perceive music from their earliest developmental stages.
It wouldn’t have been as complex and put-together as we’d expect today, which is where the problem of defining where the musical sound actually starts to rear its head. The same can generally be said for rhythmic awareness too, due to the possibility that early proto-humans had the motor impulses to create percussion before melody existed. If we define music as sounds presented at a variable pitch, then even the earliest proto-humans had a capacity for creating music before they could even speak.
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