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The smell of damp limestone dust and algae displace the aromas of trees and meadows. After a minute’s walk, the cave floor drops precipitously, and a metal walkway carries me on. Below my feet is a pit about four meters deep, illuminated by scattered spotlights, its walls bermed with sandbags. This is the site of an archaeological dig underway since the 1970s. The bags protect the unexcavated layers below, ready for work to recommence later in the year. I look down from my perch on the metal walkway. Propped on the sandbags are laminated paper signs naming and dating the cultures associated with the sediment horizons or layers. First Neanderthals, then the changing culture of anatomically modern humans in the ice age. Fragments of memory, layered into the earth. In one of the the deepest, oldest layers of human presence, the Aurignacian, lay the female figurine and the griffon vulture flute, now on view at the Blaubeuren Museum ten minutes’ drive from here. My feet on steel mesh, I hover over the excavation, gazing on this record of human life. My life is almost entirely embedded in the tempo of modernity, living by the minute, focused on hours and sometimes years, living in houses that will likely fall apart this century, using electronic tools that will not see out the decade. 
Could It Be Magic?
Our culture is on track to remake itself and much of the Earth by century’s end. Almost nothing draws our senses, imaginations, and aspirations further than a few years. And when we do think on the scale of thousands of years, it is hard to imagine any continuity of the human story between now and this distant future. The past, too, is alien, out of reach of the senses and thus bodily understanding. The vast majority of our species’ time on Earth was experienced by people with bodies and brains just like ours, living and sometimes thriving through their relationships with one another and the land. The form of these relationships differed on different continents, but whether in Africa, Eurasia, Australia, or later, the Americas, the record speaks of persistence across spans of time incommensurate with my experience of the everyday. This long life as hunters, gatherers, and agriculturalists is part of our identity and inheritance, now almost entirely obscured by the technologies and preoccupations of the moment. For a few moments, it feels good to breathe the scents of old Earth, and I feel at home. This is not nostalgia. I don’t hanker for a return to an illusory Eden. Instead, the pit recalibrates within me the sense of what it means to be human. In these long, almost forgotten millennia lies much of our history. Forgive And Forget
A fragment of truth about identity is revealed here. I’d known this, of course, but our species’ past seemed abstract, a disembodied set of ideas. This pit, this exhumation of time, spoke not only to ideas but to the lived, embodied experience of our species. I linger, savoring the sight of so much human life condensed into one place, then move deeper into the cave. From the walls of this tunnel, the clang of my feet on the metal gratings echoes, a harsh and confined sound. But there’s a softening up ahead, a spaciousness that intrigues my ears. I duck at the passageway’s end, pass through a constriction, and, treading on dust and gravel, enter the cave floor beyond the excavation. I lift my head and gasp. I’ve stepped into a vast cavern. A few spotlights directed at the walls suggest its size, but it is the sound of water drops that drives home the point. They fall from the high ceiling onto puddles and wet stone. Each tok of their landings fills the space, quiet snaps that reverberate for more than a second. Count Your Blessings
Even the scuffs and crunches of my feet on the cave floor are magnified. The cave sounds like a Romanesque church or a large unadorned rotunda. There’s no singing bird here to demonstrate how whistled notes behave, and so I use my voice and hands to explore sound. I clap and the impulse comes back to me as a stretched decay, loud at first, then tapering over a second or two. Later, when I deliver the same clap outside, it is a lash of sound, gone in an instant. In the cave, I whistle and each note remains strong for a second or two after my breath stills. The effect is sonic animacy, as if the cave imparts afterlife to sound. The walls reflect sound, sustaining reverberation as sound bounces from one side of the enclosed space to another. But even a good sound reflector like stone drains some energy from sound waves. In a voluminous space, sound has long airborne intervals where it flows with little attenuation between its draining collisions with walls. Hohle Fels cave has a volume of six thousand square meters, like a big church. This cave’s reverberation is much more drawn out than that of Geißenklösterle. As a consequence, very rapid and nuanced sounds are quickly blurred. If I’m just a few meters away from other visitors, their speech turns to a velvety smear. This would be a terrible place to give a lecture. Likewise, a complex violin piece would sound disastrous here, the swiftly changing notes would melt into one another. But simpler melodies sound gorgeous. I’ve never heard my whistling lips sound so good. Outside the cave, in the meadow, my hand claps and whistles are like thin, dry bread. Inside, they fatten and expand into luscious slabs of cake. Flute music would be gorgeous here. In parts of the cave, reverberation of my voice hits sweet spots and resonates, amplifying frequencies of sound whose wavelength matches the size of the space. Especially in the smaller side chambers, the lowest frequencies of my voice balloon. In the cave, this resonance combines with echoes to create an expansive feeling, an acoustic luminosity. Paleolithic people surely chose the Hohle Fels and Geißenklösterle caves for protection from the elements, not for their sonic qualities.