We really know so little about the ancients. I mean the real ancients.

You will oft times hear of the 'missing link'. That is so 19th century. Silly really.

I mean Homo Erectus arose, so to speak, amidst several simians 1.8 million years ago. He then discovered fire. He dug a hole, laid some rocks in it, and made fire. Hearth & Home eight hundred thousand years ago. Then he/she took off out of Africa and settled in Europe, Indonesia, China.... At least that is the story line of Western Anthropologists and has been so for well over fifty years of research.

The Homo Erectus of 1.8 Million years ago was different from Homo Erectus eight hundred thousand years ago.  And it certainly is agreed that he/she were floating upon the waters way back when in some sort of fashioned craft. Traveling thousands of miles on land and on sea--by island hopping as other mammals have.

Anthropologists have great difficulty agreeing on whether Homo Erectus in Asia just morphed into the Asian or if 200,000 years ago or 100,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens Sapiens (because many feel HE was part and parcel Homo Sapiens with smaller brains) came once again out of Africa and traversed the world.

Regardless, as I have attempted to point out in earlier blogs, forty thousand years ago SOMETHING HAPPENED.  There was a giant leap forward.  If there is indeed a god, he/she/it reached down and touch a few 'humans' and they changed forever. Magically.

When I become bored with the hum-drum news sites I retire to the magic place known as National Geographic. I would become entranced by NG as a child as I leafed through it. Today I found this:

A vulture-bone flute discovered in a European cave is likely the world's oldest recognizable musical instrument and pushes back humanity's musical roots, a new study says.

The bone-flute pieces were found in 2008 at Hohle Fels, a Stone Age cave in southern Germany, according to the study, led by archaeologist Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany.

With five finger holes and a V-shaped mouthpiece, the almost complete bird-bone flute--made from the naturally hollow wing bone of a griffon vulture--is just 0.3 inch (8 millimeters) wide and was originally about 13 inches (34 centimeters) long.

Flute fragments found earlier at the nearby site of Geissenklösterle have been dated to around 35,000 years ago.

The newfound flutes, though, "date to the very period of settlement in the region by modern humans ... about 40,000 years ago," Conard said.

 The mammoth-ivory flutes would have been especially challenging to make, the team said.

Using only stone tools, the flute maker would have had to split a section of curved ivory along its natural grain. The two halves would then have been hollowed out, carved, and fitted together with an airtight seal.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/06/090624-bone-flute-oldest-instrument.html

This find, these flutes really blew me away--pun intended. You see the first cave paintings are 40,000 years old.  Now 'man' had been residing in caves for some time. 100,000 years ago Homo Sapiens Sapiens was residing in caves in the Middle East near groups of Neandertals living in their own caves.

But no paintings.  And wouldn't you know it that NG has another separate article about cave drawings and cave RESONANCE in the same issue:

Prehistoric peoples chose places of natural resonant sound to draw their famed cave sketches, according to new analyses of paleolithic caves in France.

In at least ten locations, drawings of horses, bison, and mammoths seem to match locations that focus, amplify, and transform the sounds of human voices and musical instruments

For example, "maybe horses are related to spaces that sound a certain way," he said.

Reznikoff will present his latest findings this week at the annual meeting of the Acoustics Society of America in Paris.

Strategic Placement

An expert in the acoustics of 11th- and 12th-century European churches, Reznikoff often hums to himself when entering a room for the first time so he can "feel its sounds."

He was surprised to discover that in some of the rooms in Le Portel decorated with painted animals, his humming became noticeably louder and clearer.

"Immediately the idea came," he told National Geographic News. "Would there be a relationship between the location of the painting and the quality of the resonance in these locations?"

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/07/080702-cave-paintings.html

This juncture in time, forty thousand years ago, is a wonder to me. Paintings. Beautiful paintings ARISE OUT OF NOWHERE. Nothing like it before. Oh you will see movies and documentaries about fire. FORGET IT. WE HAD FIRE FOR A MILLION YEARS.

But not painting. And AT THE SAME TIME WE FIND MUSIC. And then we see the great central 'hall' of  the cave as a kind of church. A HOLY PLACE.

Something happened to the human brain. Synapses fired. Some chemical reaction took place. Our brains had expanded over that sixty thousand year period. Do not kid yourself. The Homo Sapiens Sapiens of the ME caves was different from us.  But the Homo Sapiens Sapiens of forty thousand years ago did not have any difference in brain capacity than us, really.

The reason I write of this, and that I write of this with a huge degree of reverence is that it fits so well into another theme I have touched on in other blogs, including my recent biblical study posts.

Homer did not sit down one day in 750BC and write the Iliad and the Odyssey like King wrote his hundred novels.  Homer was writing down songs. He was redacting them to a story line. These songs came from different tribes over different times. And his two epics were redacted, probably by some Homeric School over the centuries. 

Homer begins the Epic Iliad with, I sing.... Which is why eight hundred years later Virgil begins the Aeneid:

I sing of arms and the man....

Genesis is a song.......a series of songs written down by at least four authors (or schools of authors) and set down eventually into some order over centuries.

But these National Geographic articles tell me that the human being has been singing sacred songs in his church for forty thousand years. Imagine that!!!

The fire would be lit and the shadows would dance upon the walls making the visages painted on those walls by human hands, dance and change shapes. A truly mystical experience.

The bison, the deer, the mammoth........all moving.

And at the same time, the members of the cave clan would be dancing while flutes were played. (And I would surmise some sort of drum accompaniment) And members were chanting, singing to the music. Carried into a religious trance of community.

THESE WERE TRULY THE ANCIENT ONES.