This is fascinating. It lends credence to the view that music is universal and not cultural.
The same documentary from which this clip comes shows the oldest known human art as well--cave paintings in France and sculptures in southern Germany. Beautiful, very moving, almost 3-dimensional representations of animals now extinct, in many cases giving us evidence for what they looked like outside where before we only had bones.
And returning to universality, the very oldest cave painting and the very oldest sculpture ever found share a subject: guess what?
(the bear and the bison were superimposed later)
Not that I'm suggesting some kind of crude, puerile interpretation of this; rather, I think it reflects something of the sublime nature of art, beauty, love, and their relation to life on earth that these earliest attempts from thousands of years ago share with the masterworks from the pinnacle of Western civilization, just a century or four ago. Makes you wonder if the purpose of building the first musical instruments was romancing cave girls. It's too bad they didn't have a system of writing: I'd love to know about their poetry.
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