I was watching a documentary on the Chauvet caves of Southern France which contain a plethora of the oldest cave paintings still in existence. One chapter of the presentation focused on a more general area-wide examination of the early human cultures of that area.
A 40,000 year old ivory flute, discovered around Hohle Fels near Schelkingen in southwestern Germany, that was designed to utilize the pentatonic scale; consisting of five notes per octave. This means a tonality we know use today was already in use by Paleolithic man over four hundred centuries past. This same pentatonic scale must have been passed down from early man to become the basis for Celtic, Greek, African, Asian, Sami and Native American traditional/folk music; among countless others. Eventually, the arrangement would continue its influence, and remains today a foundation for modern music.
This illumination lead me to ponder what other elements persistent to human culture may be linked to or traced back to our prehistoric cultures. What sort of data analysis could possibly uncover (or at the very least, hint at) such ancient connections?
While it maybe a stretch, I think traditional music in an of itself could be the empirical evidence needed for such research. What if one were to create a database that identified every note of a massive collection of traditional/folk songs from a vast array of human cultures spanning the widest possible time frame?
That data could the be analyzed to identify prevalent “repetitive themes” of note arrangements that persist throughout the whole of human history. Since often, musical evolution reflects it’s previous generation, is it possible that such research could determine a composition of musical notes that could link back to some of the earliest compositions made by man?
It would be interesting to take the results of such research and compile, perhaps from the most persistent repetitions, a song to reflect on the origins of music – “The Human Song” in a manner of speaking.
On that same note, I found this interesting tidbit while researching this line of thought. Ab arrangement for solo lyre, of the 3400 year old “Hurrian Hymn no.6”, which was discovered in Ugarit in Syria in the early 1950s, and was preserved for 3400 years on a clay tablet, written in the Cuniform text of the ancient Hurrian language.
It is The oldest written song yet known. I find it intriguing that I can hear a familiarity with many more modern traditional musics in its arrangement.