And There Was Music

For several years, prehistorians, archaeologists and musicologists have been trying to find the moment when music was born. The art of our ancestors has long been considered exclusively visual. But discoveries have shaken these representations, in particular that of perforated bird bones resembling flutes, more than 35,000 years old, found by the archaeologist Suzanne Munzel during the 1990s in the German Jura. Exploring the caves "with their ears", acousticians have also established links between the location of cave paintings and the resonance of the walls. So many advances that encourage us to reconsider certain prehistoric objects. Seen as cereal pestles, cylinders from the Ivory Coast, since renamed "lithophones", produce a rain of crystalline notes.