The first musical instrument?
You may notice that I’m not making any election predictions. But they’re not hard to find; they’re just about everywhere. Take your pick. I plan to post about the election when results are getting clearer, which probably will be some time tonight.
What I’m doing right now is other things. I’m about to exercise to try to dissipate a bit of my tension. But I thought you might enjoy this interesting distraction:
Cool. These days, I don’t think it’s very common for people who have bothered to learn even a little bit about Neanderthals to still think of them as stupid and barbaric. We know they were people, too!
Thank you for that very interesting video.
I love it when all the “settled science” about the past gets upset by new discoveries.
Vote Neanderthal 2024.
My old slow computer doesn’t do audio or video, so I have no idea what the above might be. But I saw a show on PBS a couple of years ago that displayed – a shelf full of rocks from a cave. The docent was droning on about anthropologists’ theories as to why these stones (smoothed and oval-ish; looked kind of like smooth potato-shaped river rock) were special enough to be kept in a Sacred Space. As she talked about the tiny fragments of wood or fibrous dust also found distributed around the stones, she was fiddling with a wooden “something” that had a sling or support at each end – and she set one of the stones onto it. So now we see a cradle holding our smooth stone up from and apart from the others. Then she struck the stone gently with a small wooden mallet. The result – a beautiful, sweet, singing tone. And then she pulled the first stone off the cradle and set a different one on, and struck it. Musical stones!!! I was just amazed.
So, Flautist Neanderthalis?