Divje Babe
Encyclopedia
The Divje Babe flute is a cave bear
femur
pierced by spaced holes that was found at the Divje Babe archeological
park located near Cerkno
in northwestern Slovenia
. It has been suggested that it is the world's oldest known musical instrument
, but this is in dispute. The continuing dispute notwithstanding, the artifact remains on prominent public display as a flute in the National Museum of Slovenia
(Narodni Muzej Slovenije) in Ljubljana
. The museum's visitor leaflet maintains that manufacture by Neanderthals "is reliably proven".
, 45m long and up to 15 m wide. It is located 230m above the Idrijca river, near Cerkno
, and is accessible to visitors. Researchers working at this site have uncovered more than 600 archaeological finds in at least ten levels, including 20 hearth
s, the skeletal remains of cave bears, and have studied climate change during the pleistocene
. According to the museum, the alleged flute has been associated with the "end of the middle Pleistocene
" and the time of Neanderthal
s, about 55,000 years ago.
juvenile cave bear
femur at the Divje Babe site, near a Mousterian
hearth. Because it has characteristics of a flute
, he has called it the "Neanderthal flute". Whether it is actually a flute created by Neanderthal
s is a subject of debate. It is broken at both ends, and has two complete holes and what may be the incomplete remains of one hole on each end, meaning that the bone may have had four or more holes before being damaged. The bone fragment is the diaphysis
of the left femur of a one to two year-old cave bear, and is 113.6 mm long. The maximum diameters of the two complete holes are 9.7 and 9.0 mm. The distance between the centers of the holes is 35 mm.
Soon after its publication, the status of the object as a musical instrument came under scrutiny by taphonomist
Francesco d'Errico (et al., 1998), Holderman and Serangeli (1999), and Chase and Nowell (1998, 552), all of whom suggest it is more likely to be the result of carnivore chewing than Neanderthal construction and claim that the bone has been damaged on all sides by the chewing of a carnivore.
If the bone is a flute it would be evidence of the existence of music 43,000 years ago, and of the making of music by Neanderthals. Thus Ivan Turk has asserted that whether the holes are of "artificial" (made by Neanderthals) or "natural" (punctures from a carnivore
bite) origin is the "crucial question.",
Despite the disagreement about the bone's markings, the bone has become a noted attraction in its Slovenian museum, publicized on official Slovenian websites aired on TV with tunes played on a clay replica and is a source of pride for the country. In the West, paintings were made, models constructed, and musicians such as Biology Professor and flautist Jelle Atema have played them publicly.
The arguments for one or the other interpretation are based on the available taphonomic evidence derived from direct study of the artifact, as well as related studies of Neanderthal tools and of carnivores of the time period.
Turk conducted laboratory experiments which pierced holes in fresh bear bones in the manner of carnivore punctures, and in every case, the bones split. Yet in the Divje Babe instance, the bone did not break, a fact not matching expectations of carnivore action, as Turk's results showed. Turk wrote, in his monograph and in his article in MIT's Origins of Music anthology, the bone shows no "counter-bites" that one would normally expect on the other side of the bone matching the immense pressure necessary for a bite to make the center holes.
Turk's 1997 monograph reported that the holes have similar diameters which would accommodate fingertips, and all are circular instead of oval (as carnivore bites often are). Furthermore, all are in the proper ratio of bore size to hole size found in most flutes, and the bone is the kind (femur) usually used for bone flutes.
An examination of the specimen using computed tomography
was published in 2005 by Ivan Turk et al., in which he concluded that "the two partially preserved holes were formerly created before the damage...or before the indisputable intervention of a carnivore."
The National Museum of Slovenia argues that this evidence has "finally refuted hypotheses that the bone was perforated because of a bear bite". The manufacture by Neanderthals "is reliably proven" and its significance in the understanding of their capabilities and the development of music and speech is secure.
Turk, et al. (in the monograph Moussterian Bone Flute, p. 160) wrote that "the marrow cavity is basically cleaned of spongiose. The colour of the marrow cavity does not differ from the colour of the external surface of the bone. So we may conclude that the marrow cavity was already open at the time.... Otherwise, it would be a darker colour than the surface of the bone, as we know from coloured marrow cavities of whole limb bones."
April Nowell stated in an interview that "at Turk's invitation, [Nowell] and Chase went to Slovenia last year... They came away even more skeptical that the bear bone had ever emitted music. For one thing, both ends had clearly been gnawed away by something, perhaps a wolf, seeking greasy marrow. The holes could have simply been perforated in the process by pointed canine or carnassial teeth, and their roundness could be due to natural damage after the bone was abandoned. The presence of marrow suggests that no one had bothered to hollow out the bone as if to create an end-blown flute. Says Nowell, '[Turk's] willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, whereas we're not.' "
evidence that the holes were animal-made. This was noted by Turk, et al., in his monograph, and noted from the opposing viewpoint by Nowell and Chase in their Current Anthroplogy article in the Aug-Oct 1998 issue. "Holes in the specimen", wrote Nowell, et al., "were almost certainly made sequentially rather than simultaneously and that the distance between them has nothing to do with the distance between any two teeth in a wolf's jaw."
Turk (2005, 2006) points out that the features "common" between the artifact and other chewed bones studied by d'Errico (see hole shape above) do not include the line-up of the holes. In the d'Errico, et al. 1998 Antiquity article, none of the bones referred to or photographed by d'Errico et al., had the feature of 3 or more holes in a straight line.
Marcel Otte (director of the museum of Prehistoire, Universite de Liege, Belgium) pointed out in a Current Anthropology (April 2000) article, that there is a possible thumb-hole on the opposite side of the Divje Babe bone, which, making 5 holes, would perfectly fit a human hand.
In a November 2006 article, Iain Morley (holding the carnivore-origin viewpoint, and who endorsed almost all of d'Errico's findings quoted above) listed an additional observation: "Whilst the collections of cave bear bones examined by d'Errico et al. (1998), as well as those discussed by Turk et al. (2001), do show similar shaped and damaged holes...none of these occur in the diaphysis of a femur" (the thick part), as is found on the reputed flute (Morley 2006, 329).
Turk wrote in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
book The Origins of Music: "If this probability [of having lined-up holes looking like a flute] were greater (and of course it isn't) it is likely that there would have been more such finds, since...carnivores in cave dens were at least as active on bones, if not more so, than people in cave dwellings....".
Bob Fink claimed in his essay in 1997, that the bone's holes were "consistent with four notes of the diatonic scale" (do, re, mi, fa) based on the spacing of those four holes. The spacing of the holes on a modern diatonic flute (minor scale) are unique, and not evenly spaced. In essence, Fink said, they are like a simple fingerprint. The Divje Babe bone's holes matched those spacings very closely to a series of note-holes in a minor scale.
Nowell and Chase wrote in Studies In Music Archaeology III (presentations at a 2000 world conference on music archaeology), and saying in the media as well, that the juvenile bear bone was too short to play those four holes in-tune to any diatonic series of tones and half-tones. (Fink had suggested there may have originally been a mouthpiece extension added to the bone before it was broken.)
In 2000, Fink produced an analysis of the probability that four randomly placed holes would appear in-line in a recognizable musical scale was on the order of a few in several million.
In a 2011 article Matija Turk published the results of a collaboration with Ljuben Dimkaroski, an academic musician who had made replicas of the artefact. The authors argue that the instrument encompassed a range of two and a half octaves, which can be extended to three octaves by overblowing. Dimkaroski created over 30 wooden and bone replicas of the flute and experimented with them. The replicas were made from femurs of juvenile brown bears provided by Hunters Association of Slovenia, but also calf, goat, pig, roe and red deer bones. In the end he concentrated on playing a replica made on a femur of a juvenile cave bear from Divje babe I, to come as close as possible to the dimensions of the original.
Cave Bear
The cave bear was a species of bear that lived in Europe during the Pleistocene and became extinct at the beginning of the Last Glacial Maximum about 27,500 years ago....
femur
Femur
The femur , or thigh bone, is the most proximal bone of the leg in tetrapod vertebrates capable of walking or jumping, such as most land mammals, birds, many reptiles such as lizards, and amphibians such as frogs. In vertebrates with four legs such as dogs and horses, the femur is found only in...
pierced by spaced holes that was found at the Divje Babe archeological
Archaeology
Archaeology, or archeology , is the study of human society, primarily through the recovery and analysis of the material culture and environmental data that they have left behind, which includes artifacts, architecture, biofacts and cultural landscapes...
park located near Cerkno
Cerkno
Cerkno is a small town and a municipality in the Littoral region of Slovenia.It has around 2,000 inhabitants and is the administrative centre of the Cerkno hills...
in northwestern Slovenia
Slovenia
Slovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...
. It has been suggested that it is the world's oldest known musical instrument
Paleolithic flutes
A number of flutes dating to the European Upper Paleolithic have been discovered. The undisputed claims are all products of the Aurignacian archaeological culture, beginning about 40,000 to 35,000 years ago, and have been found in the Swabian Alb region of Germany. These flutes represent the...
, but this is in dispute. The continuing dispute notwithstanding, the artifact remains on prominent public display as a flute in the National Museum of Slovenia
National Museum of Slovenia
The National Museum of Slovenia is located in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. It is situated in the Center district of the city near the Tivoli Park....
(Narodni Muzej Slovenije) in Ljubljana
Ljubljana
Ljubljana is the capital of Slovenia and its largest city. It is the centre of the City Municipality of Ljubljana. It is located in the centre of the country in the Ljubljana Basin, and is a mid-sized city of some 270,000 inhabitants...
. The museum's visitor leaflet maintains that manufacture by Neanderthals "is reliably proven".
Site
Divje Babe is the oldest known archaeological site in Slovenia. The site is the location of a horizontal caveCave
A cave or cavern is a natural underground space large enough for a human to enter. The term applies to natural cavities some part of which is in total darkness. The word cave also includes smaller spaces like rock shelters, sea caves, and grottos.Speleology is the science of exploration and study...
, 45m long and up to 15 m wide. It is located 230m above the Idrijca river, near Cerkno
Cerkno
Cerkno is a small town and a municipality in the Littoral region of Slovenia.It has around 2,000 inhabitants and is the administrative centre of the Cerkno hills...
, and is accessible to visitors. Researchers working at this site have uncovered more than 600 archaeological finds in at least ten levels, including 20 hearth
Hearth
In common historic and modern usage, a hearth is a brick- or stone-lined fireplace or oven often used for cooking and/or heating. For centuries, the hearth was considered an integral part of a home, often its central or most important feature...
s, the skeletal remains of cave bears, and have studied climate change during the pleistocene
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....
. According to the museum, the alleged flute has been associated with the "end of the middle Pleistocene
Pleistocene
The Pleistocene is the epoch from 2,588,000 to 11,700 years BP that spans the world's recent period of repeated glaciations. The name pleistocene is derived from the Greek and ....
" and the time of Neanderthal
Neanderthal
The Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...
s, about 55,000 years ago.
Neanderthal flute
In 1995, Ivan Turk found an approximately 43,100 year-oldjuvenile cave bear
Cave Bear
The cave bear was a species of bear that lived in Europe during the Pleistocene and became extinct at the beginning of the Last Glacial Maximum about 27,500 years ago....
femur at the Divje Babe site, near a Mousterian
Mousterian
Mousterian is a name given by archaeologists to a style of predominantly flint tools associated primarily with Homo neanderthalensis and dating to the Middle Paleolithic, the middle part of the Old Stone Age.-Naming:...
hearth. Because it has characteristics of a flute
Flute
The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is an aerophone or reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening...
, he has called it the "Neanderthal flute". Whether it is actually a flute created by Neanderthal
Neanderthal
The Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...
s is a subject of debate. It is broken at both ends, and has two complete holes and what may be the incomplete remains of one hole on each end, meaning that the bone may have had four or more holes before being damaged. The bone fragment is the diaphysis
Diaphysis
The diaphysis is the main or mid section of a long bone. It is made up of cortical bone and usually contains bone marrow and adipose tissue ....
of the left femur of a one to two year-old cave bear, and is 113.6 mm long. The maximum diameters of the two complete holes are 9.7 and 9.0 mm. The distance between the centers of the holes is 35 mm.
Soon after its publication, the status of the object as a musical instrument came under scrutiny by taphonomist
Taphonomy
Taphonomy is the study of decaying organisms over time and how they become fossilized . The term taphonomy was introduced to paleontology in 1940 by Russian scientist Ivan Efremov to describe the study of the transition of remains, parts, or products of organisms, from the biosphere, to the...
Francesco d'Errico (et al., 1998), Holderman and Serangeli (1999), and Chase and Nowell (1998, 552), all of whom suggest it is more likely to be the result of carnivore chewing than Neanderthal construction and claim that the bone has been damaged on all sides by the chewing of a carnivore.
If the bone is a flute it would be evidence of the existence of music 43,000 years ago, and of the making of music by Neanderthals. Thus Ivan Turk has asserted that whether the holes are of "artificial" (made by Neanderthals) or "natural" (punctures from a carnivore
Carnivore
A carnivore meaning 'meat eater' is an organism that derives its energy and nutrient requirements from a diet consisting mainly or exclusively of animal tissue, whether through predation or scavenging...
bite) origin is the "crucial question.",
The arguments for one or the other interpretation are based on the available taphonomic evidence derived from direct study of the artifact, as well as related studies of Neanderthal tools and of carnivores of the time period.
Hole shape
D'Errico et al. made an analysis of the artifact in comparison to cave-bear bone accumulations where no hominid presence was known. They published photos of several bones with holes in them which had more or less circular holes similar to those found in the artifact. Their conclusion was that it was possible for these holes to have been made by animal, and that of the available options this was the most likely. In 2000, d'Errico analyzed the artifact firsthand, and would write that "the presence of two or possibly three perforations on the suggested flute cannot therefore be considered as evidence of human manufacture, as this is a common feature in the studied sample."Turk conducted laboratory experiments which pierced holes in fresh bear bones in the manner of carnivore punctures, and in every case, the bones split. Yet in the Divje Babe instance, the bone did not break, a fact not matching expectations of carnivore action, as Turk's results showed. Turk wrote, in his monograph and in his article in MIT's Origins of Music anthology, the bone shows no "counter-bites" that one would normally expect on the other side of the bone matching the immense pressure necessary for a bite to make the center holes.
Turk's 1997 monograph reported that the holes have similar diameters which would accommodate fingertips, and all are circular instead of oval (as carnivore bites often are). Furthermore, all are in the proper ratio of bore size to hole size found in most flutes, and the bone is the kind (femur) usually used for bone flutes.
An examination of the specimen using computed tomography
Computed tomography
X-ray computed tomography or Computer tomography , is a medical imaging method employing tomography created by computer processing...
was published in 2005 by Ivan Turk et al., in which he concluded that "the two partially preserved holes were formerly created before the damage...or before the indisputable intervention of a carnivore."
The National Museum of Slovenia argues that this evidence has "finally refuted hypotheses that the bone was perforated because of a bear bite". The manufacture by Neanderthals "is reliably proven" and its significance in the understanding of their capabilities and the development of music and speech is secure.
Bone marrow
The issue of how much bone marrow remains in the artifact is important, because the making of flutes from bone usually includes removing the marrow.Turk, et al. (in the monograph Moussterian Bone Flute, p. 160) wrote that "the marrow cavity is basically cleaned of spongiose. The colour of the marrow cavity does not differ from the colour of the external surface of the bone. So we may conclude that the marrow cavity was already open at the time.... Otherwise, it would be a darker colour than the surface of the bone, as we know from coloured marrow cavities of whole limb bones."
April Nowell stated in an interview that "at Turk's invitation, [Nowell] and Chase went to Slovenia last year... They came away even more skeptical that the bear bone had ever emitted music. For one thing, both ends had clearly been gnawed away by something, perhaps a wolf, seeking greasy marrow. The holes could have simply been perforated in the process by pointed canine or carnassial teeth, and their roundness could be due to natural damage after the bone was abandoned. The presence of marrow suggests that no one had bothered to hollow out the bone as if to create an end-blown flute. Says Nowell, '[Turk's] willing to give it the benefit of the doubt, whereas we're not.' "
Hole spacing and alignment
There is no evidence that the two holes could have been bitten at the same time. The tooth spans were checked by all taphonomists concerned to see if any animals could bite two or more such holes at once. No match could be found to any known animals. If a match had been found, it could have been cited as prima faciePrima facie
Prima facie is a Latin expression meaning on its first encounter, first blush, or at first sight. The literal translation would be "at first face", from the feminine form of primus and facies , both in the ablative case. It is used in modern legal English to signify that on first examination, a...
evidence that the holes were animal-made. This was noted by Turk, et al., in his monograph, and noted from the opposing viewpoint by Nowell and Chase in their Current Anthroplogy article in the Aug-Oct 1998 issue. "Holes in the specimen", wrote Nowell, et al., "were almost certainly made sequentially rather than simultaneously and that the distance between them has nothing to do with the distance between any two teeth in a wolf's jaw."
Turk (2005, 2006) points out that the features "common" between the artifact and other chewed bones studied by d'Errico (see hole shape above) do not include the line-up of the holes. In the d'Errico, et al. 1998 Antiquity article, none of the bones referred to or photographed by d'Errico et al., had the feature of 3 or more holes in a straight line.
Marcel Otte (director of the museum of Prehistoire, Universite de Liege, Belgium) pointed out in a Current Anthropology (April 2000) article, that there is a possible thumb-hole on the opposite side of the Divje Babe bone, which, making 5 holes, would perfectly fit a human hand.
In a November 2006 article, Iain Morley (holding the carnivore-origin viewpoint, and who endorsed almost all of d'Errico's findings quoted above) listed an additional observation: "Whilst the collections of cave bear bones examined by d'Errico et al. (1998), as well as those discussed by Turk et al. (2001), do show similar shaped and damaged holes...none of these occur in the diaphysis of a femur" (the thick part), as is found on the reputed flute (Morley 2006, 329).
Turk wrote in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
book The Origins of Music: "If this probability [of having lined-up holes looking like a flute] were greater (and of course it isn't) it is likely that there would have been more such finds, since...carnivores in cave dens were at least as active on bones, if not more so, than people in cave dwellings....".
Diatonic scale
Nowell and Chase wrote in Studies In Music Archaeology III (presentations at a 2000 world conference on music archaeology), and saying in the media as well, that the juvenile bear bone was too short to play those four holes in-tune to any diatonic series of tones and half-tones. (Fink had suggested there may have originally been a mouthpiece extension added to the bone before it was broken.)
- [Nowell] along with archeologist Philip Chase, had serious doubts as soon as they saw photos of the bone on the Internet.... The Divje Babe bone bears some resemblance to the dozens of younger, uncontested bone flutes from European Upper Paleolithic [UP] sites. But, says Nowell, these obvious flutes are longer, have more holes, and exhibit telltale tool marks left from their manufacture. No such marks occur on the bear bone. Canadian musicologist Bob Fink proposed that the spacing of the flute's holes matches music's standard diatonic scale. ...Nowell and Chase teamed with a more musically inclined colleague to show that the bear bone would need to be twice its natural total length to conform to a diatonic scale.....
In 2000, Fink produced an analysis of the probability that four randomly placed holes would appear in-line in a recognizable musical scale was on the order of a few in several million.
In a 2011 article Matija Turk published the results of a collaboration with Ljuben Dimkaroski, an academic musician who had made replicas of the artefact. The authors argue that the instrument encompassed a range of two and a half octaves, which can be extended to three octaves by overblowing. Dimkaroski created over 30 wooden and bone replicas of the flute and experimented with them. The replicas were made from femurs of juvenile brown bears provided by Hunters Association of Slovenia, but also calf, goat, pig, roe and red deer bones. In the end he concentrated on playing a replica made on a femur of a juvenile cave bear from Divje babe I, to come as close as possible to the dimensions of the original.
See also
- List of Neanderthal sites
- NeanderthalNeanderthalThe Neanderthal is an extinct member of the Homo genus known from Pleistocene specimens found in Europe and parts of western and central Asia...
- Musilanguage
- Prehistoric musicPrehistoric musicPrehistoric music is a term in the history of music for all music produced in preliterate cultures , beginning somewhere in very late geological history...
- Musical scaleMusical scaleIn music, a scale is a sequence of musical notes in ascending and descending order. Most commonly, especially in the context of the common practice period, the notes of a scale will belong to a single key, thus providing material for or being used to conveniently represent part or all of a musical...
- Diatonic