A Material Unfamiliar To My Modern Eyes

Griffon vultures spend their days soaring in search of carrion and have huge wingspans, wider than eagles’, making their wing bones an excellent source of long tubes for Paleolithic flute makers. Fine fracture lines divide the bone’s smooth surface into a dozen pieces. These fragments were recovered from cave deposits, then reassembled and interpreted by University of Tübingen archaeologists Nicholas Conard, Maria Malina, Susanne Münzel, and their colleagues. Here in the Blaubeuren Museum, adjacent to the griffon vulture flute, sits a flute of a stouter design. It has three beveled finger holes on the concave side of its curvature. A splinter extends down from the third hole, suggesting that the flute was originally longer. Unlike on the bird bone, two seams run down the length of this flute. Each seam is crossed by repeated short lines, like suture marks on a long incision. This flute is made from mammoth ivory, a material unfamiliar to my modern eyes. The griffon vulture radius is easily recognizable as a bird bone, a giant version of chicken and turkey bones. Mammoth ivory, though, has no everyday contemporary analog. The finger holes and ends, though, appear cut into solid bone.

Ask Yourself Why

The object seems exotic to me, but for Paleolithic people the mammoth was a staple of both diet and craft. Mammoth ivory was multifunctional, and judging from the remains left in caves, often discarded or abandoned. Bird bones are hollow and fit readily in a human hand, good matches for flute making. But a mammoth tusk is solid and hard to carve. Close study of cut marks on the flute and experiments by modern archaeologists and reconstruction experts suggest the manufacturing sequence used by the ice age craftspeople. First, they used sharp stone cutters to excise a portion of a large tusk, making a stave or blank. Thousands of tool remnants in the caves show that they also used this technique to carve blanks for hunting projectiles from reindeer antlers. Ivory is not easily turned into a tube, and the artisans lacked drills. So they pared the stave into a cylinder, split it lengthwise, then scooped out each half before reassembling the whole, now as a tube. To do this, they exploited the growth form of the ivory. Mammoth tusks have an outer layer, cementum, around a thicker inner core, dentine. By carefully carving the stave from the junction between these layers, the makers crafted a stave that was half cementum and half dentine.

The Sun Never Shone That Day

The junction was a weak spot that could be eased apart with blades and small wedges, bisecting the cylinder along its long axis. Before splitting the ivory, they cut regular deep grooves down the two sides, perpendicular to the axis of the column. These marks guided the flute’s reassembly once the halves had been hollowed out. Tree resin and animal sinew likely held the pieces together. The result was an airtight fit, ready for the addition of beveled finger holes and a notched end for human breath. Even after breakage and burial for forty millennia, the flute is an impressively precise construction, its halves fitting snugly, notches aligned. Its thin walls give the illusion of coming from a natural tube, like a bird bone, belying the labor that went into its production. Tool marks on the fragmentary remains of the others indicate similar methods of construction. Pollen and remains of wood in caves show that vegetation was mostly grasses, sagebrush, and a few boreal shrubs and trees. Every bite of food, stick of fuel, and piece of clothing had to be wrested from a landscape often snowbound and always cold. Yet these people devoted the highest forms of their technologies to making music. The flutes, the mammoth flute in particular, emerged from the application of the most sophisticated craft possible at the time.

A Step In The Right Direction

Their work evinced deep understanding of material properties and skillful use of tools. Soundless, solid animal tusks were transformed by human hands and imagination into hollow, multipitched wind instruments. Precisely wielded stone tools carved voids, spaces where human breath could enter and reanimate the dead. Instead, people living arduous and undoubtedly insecure lives gave the world the first known instrumental music. When our modern schools cut music programs, polemicists from the left and right argue that art is decadent or an excess to be trimmed, and academics dismiss music as fundamentally unnecessary to human culture, they might look back to finely crafted flutes from ice age caves and reconsider. I sit with the flutes in the museum room for a few hours. Twenty people pass through. Three look at the flutes. The others hurry straight to the wall of buttons, each one provoking from a loudspeaker a brief melody from a reconstructed flute. To my consternation, the objects themselves elicit little visible wonder or interest. To be fair, the flutes have competition. The museum is also home to exquisite carved figurines. Instrumental music was not the only human art preserved in these caves. The inhabitants of these caves were creative people, transforming everyday bone and ivory into what we now call art. The most famous of the sculptures is just down the museum hallway from the flute displays. It has its own room, a dark space with one illuminated object at its center. No wonder visitors tend to hurry past the flutes. We’re in a museum whose narrative builds toward a hallowed object. On a plinth stands an impressively plump female human figure. Instead of a head, the ivory carving has a small ring, delicately worked. Polish from such a cord is still visible within the eye of the ring. The figure’s limbs are short and part of the left arm is missing. Breasts, buttocks, and vulva are swollen and slightly lopsided. The waist is pinched and the belly flat. The hands are finely rendered, resting above her hips. Incised lines run across the figure, perhaps suggesting a wrap or other covering, although sculptures from this era of nonhuman animals are often also decorated with similar surface markings.