And I think to myself, what a wonderful world!

Europe in 40,000 BC was a pretty miserable place. The Northwest, including Scandinavia, Northern Germany and Great Britain and Ireland, was covered by a giant ice sheet similar to the one on Greenland today. A smaller icecap covered the Alps. It was cold.

The continent was occupied by a type of creature which we call Neanderthal Man. This guy is sometimes considered a separate species from us humans, and sometimes just a sub-type of modern humans. Current thinking puts him as a different species which could not interbreed with Homo sapiens, but that could change. The Neanderthals were evolved to cope with the cold, being bigger and more heavily set, they didn't lose heat as easily. They'd been living in Europe for a long time, certainly since the beginning of the ice age 130,000 years ago. These were no dumb beasts, either—they were experts at

working with flint, carving axe heads and scrapers with precision. This is not an easy task as anyone who has tried it will attest. A scraper is a sharp tool for separating meat from an animal hide. I've held in my hand one of these scrapers dated back to 350,000 BC; possibly not Neanderthal, but another pre-Homo-sapiens species. I was very impressed with the feel of it. There were depressions carved in it so that it fit into the palm of the hand with places for the fingers and thumb. Primitive man was far from primitive.

Some time soon after 40,000 BC, modern man started to arrive in Europe. He lived on much the same food as the Neanderthals, and was theoretically worse able to take the cold, but from that point on the Neanderthals started to die out. By 30,000 BC, they were extinct. We don't know whether Homo sapiens killed them off, or just competed for their food. Either way, the evidence is that the modern men were more skilled, better craftsmen. They would have been physically identical to us except possibly for the colour of their skin. Their voices were the same and it seems reasonable to think that they would have spoken some sort of language. The Neanderthals, on the other hand, while undoubtedly intelligent, do not appear to have had the right sort of larynxes to allow proper speech, although we're not sure. So we can imagine their surprise when confronted with these new thinner, more agile, more talkative people.

We don't know whether the new humans made poetry and until recently we didn't know whether they made music. But recent

discoveries have unearthed musical instruments dating from 35,000 BC, at a time when there were both modern humans and Neanderthals in Europe: flute made from bone. You can read about them in this BBC News article. Found in southwest Germany, which would have been between the northern Icecap and the Alpine ones, these flutes were made by hollowing out vultures' wing bones and drilling finger holes along the side. If you go over to the BBC News website you can even hear what one of them would have sounded like, as they have made a copy of one and have played it: it's undoubtedly a musical instrument, although it sounds more like a modern Japanese shakuhachi than a concert flute.

So early man was a musical creature. It's nice to think that in the long cold nights, humans would have gathered together for warmth against the intense cold and sung songs to each other, accompanied in the wealthier groups by music on these flutes. It's also nice to imagine that they told each other stories, although we've no record of them.

By 12,000 BC, the ice age was coming to an end. The Neanderthals were long gone. Now the ice was starting to melt and Europe was changing shape. A new sea and a series of lakes now stretched across Northern Europe replacing the ice cap that had disappeared: the Baltic, and the line of lakes that are strung between it and the Arctic Ocean at Archangelsk. Rivers such as the Elbe and Rhine which formerly had to flow west into the sea near Nantes in France could now take an easier route to the sea, going north or northwest.

As the ice melted, sea levels across the world rose, gradually separating two parts of north-western Europe into two giant islands, Great Britain and Ireland. Eventually the level of the Mediterranean rose so high that the sea flowed up the Bosphorus channel at what is now Istanbul, turning the Black Lake into the Black Sea. At the same time, the rising temperatures caused greater evaporation, and eventually the Aral Lake and Caspian Lake became so dried up that they no longer overflowed into the Black Sea and became separate seas themselves. Europe had reached the physical shape it now is.

The human population started to grow. Inevitably they needed somewhere to sleep, and in Eastern Europe on the steppes of Russia, a novel building material was used. They built houses out of the bones of mammoths. There are four separate archaeological sites with these houses, and each house needed the bones from up to 100 mammoths, so it was not a simple task. We can assume that the skins of the mammoths would have provided a waterproof covering, although there's no trace of this now. There is some evidence that these people scavenged the bones of the mammoths rather than hunting the great beasts (a mammoth was about twice the size of a modern elephant, and formidably armed with tusks). We can hope that people passed the winter evenings in these houses singing and telling each other stories.

Many thousands of years later, humans had forgotten they had ever lived outside of Europe. They were at home in the forests and they sang to each other in the evenings and told each other stories. One such folk tale was recorded in two variants by German collectors of such tales, and was eventually made into a 'cantata', a type of choral work similar to an opera, by a young Austrian composer, Gustav Mahler. The story is of relevance, because once again it concerns bones and flutes. Mahler wrote it when he was only 20, although for various reasons it wasn't performed until much later.

The story concerns a Queen who couldn't decide on a husband. Eventually she decided to leave it to chance and set a challenge—whoever could bring her a particular red flower from the forest could marry her and become king. Two brothers set out to find the flower; one was honest, the other deceitful. They searched and searched and eventually the honest brother found the flower, whereupon he decided to take a rest. The other brother found him asleep, so he murdered him and took the flower to the queen, and became king.

Some years later, a wandering minstrel was passing through the forest, and he spotted a bone sticking out of the undergrowth. He took the bone and thought that it would make a good flute. The flute was made but when the minstrel went to play it, a ghostly voice came from it, telling how the owner of the bone had been murdered by his brother. Of course, the minstrel was so impressed with this magic that he toured the land playing the flute and it proclaimed its murder story. Eventually he reached the court of the king and queen, where, inevitably, the king's crime was revealed and his rule came to an end.

There's something very satisfying about this story. There's a certain irreverence about making a flute out of something that was once alive, and the ghostly voice that sings out reminds us of this. I wonder did similar thoughts go through the minds of the older-than-ancient humans who lived just north of the Alpine Icecap so many millennia ago, and who played their music to while away the long winter evenings?

Gnomon

09.07.09 Front Page

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