The Origins of Music: Preface - Preface

are completely reliable and are not debated in professional circles.Layer

8 contains remains of hearths and modest Paleolithic finds that,in view

of all the circumstances,can reliably be ascribed to the final phase of the

middle Paleolithic (50,000 to 35,000 years).One of the hearths was in the

direct vicinity of the find.Its absolute age has not been determined.In

this phase,the people,probably Neanderthals,visited the cave only occa-

sionally for a short time,but did not permanently occupy it.^4 This also

applies to other layers,in which two peaks of visits are recorded.The first

is older than layer 8 and is focused on layer 13.The second is younger

than layer 8 and is focused on layer 4.In a total of 8 middle Paleolithic

levels from various layers,18 hearths,570 stones,and,in addition to the

suspected flute,3 bone artifacts have been recorded.While in the cave,

Paleolithic visitors did not carry out activities that can be identified by

formal archeological methods.They did not make tools and did not

process their prey in general.However,they had many fires and used

stone tools in the cave intensively,for what activities exactly we do not

know.Beside hearths,they probably crushed skulls and marrow bones

of cave bear that had died naturally.Among tools,a great many are suit-

able for making holes.Some are damaged in such a way as to suggest

their use for chipping bone,but they do not show the specific damage

that occurs if used for that purpose.

Having established the rough time frame for the site as a whole and

for the suspected flute,we can approach the problems surrounding the

find from archeological and musicological points of view,allowing us to

come to grips with the questions this find raises.

The object is reminiscent of a flute in terms of its shape and the regular

string of artificial holes in the wall of the posterior side of the thigh

bone.It is the left thigh bone (femur) of a one to two-year-old cave bear.

Measurements of the preserved central tubular part of the bone,or

diaphysis,are as follows:length 113.6mm;width at the narrowest part

23.5 and 17.0mm,because of the approximately oval shape of the trans-

verse cross section;width of the marrow cavity at the narrowest part

around 13.0 and 10.0mm;and maximum diameters of complete holes 9.7

and 9.0mm.The distance between the centers of the two complete holes

is 35mm (see Turk,Dirjec,and Kavur 1997b).The original length of the

diaphysis plus the two ends (or epiphyses and metaphyses) would have

been approximately 210mm at this ontogenetic stage of an individual

cave bear.So the posterior side of the bone has no space for any more

holes than is indicated by the two additional possible remains of holes

(cf.B.Fink in Anonymous [1997],whose reconstruction of the find as a

flute is thus inappropriate).A putative fifth hole is only partly preserved

below one of the complete holes,on the convex anterior side of the

diaphysis.Here,the wall of the diaphysis is fractured in the shape of

239 New Perspectives on the Beginnings of Music