Bone flutes date music to about 38,000 BC
Every known culture makes music, a cultural universal whose origins stay contested and often tied to language debates. Upper Paleolithic bone flutes firmly date prehistoric music to about 38,000 BC, though Middle Paleolithic roots remain possible. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville first recorded sound.
Religions catalyzed traditions: Vedas shaped Indian classical music; Confucian Five Classics grounded Chinese music; after seventh-century Islamic expansion, Islamic music dominated Persian and Arab spheres.
Darwin’s 1871 Descent of Man cast music as sexual selection akin to mating calls—one polarizing theory among archaeologists, biologists, linguists, and neuroscientists still arguing.
Rival origin theories multiply. Herbert Spencer, and the composer Richard Wagner with his idea of speech-music, argued that music and language share a common ancestor. Others stress practical uses: economist Karl Bücher proposed coordinating group labour, musicologist Carl Stumpf long-distance signalling, and anthropologist Siegfried Nadel contact with the supernatural, while further suggestions include binding communities together or scaring off predators. Curt Sachs posited a double origin, from speech and from emotional expression, and David Teie traces musical elements to sounds heard in the womb and to emotional cries. Myth has its own inventors: Jubal in Christian tradition, Shah Jamshid in Persian legend, the goddess Saraswati in Hinduism and the Greek muses.
Because flutes are relatively complex, earlier instruments such as rattles, shakers and drums probably existed but were made of materials that rotted away. Music likely mattered most when food was scarce, and prehistoric peoples may have linked it closely with nature. In China the oldest instruments are 12 bone flutes, called gudi, from Jiahu in Henan dating to about 6000 BCE; the legendary Xia dynasty of around 2070 to 1600 BCE has left only two stone chimes, two small bells and a vessel flute called a xun.
Source: History of music
