‘It’s so alien' folk collective Heilung on world’s oldest song
Aug 18, 2022
4 minutes
About 300,000 years ago (give or take a few millennia), the human larynx dropped downwards, an evolutionary advance as vital in separating us from the apes as the development of opposable thumbs and a large cerebral cortex. It meant that our throats got larger, which enabled us to extend the sounds we could make beyond animalistic hooting and howling. Suddenly, we could talk. We could develop a vocabulary. We could sing.
This development marked the birth of music, yet we really know only about relatively recent developments in that enormouos history. The world’s oldest known musical instrument – a carved from the bone of a bear, found
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