Sev­er­al years ago, we brought you a tran­scrip­tion and a cou­ple of audio inter­pre­ta­tions of the old­est known song in the world, dis­cov­ered in the ancient Syr­i­an city of Ugar­it and dat­ing back to the 14th cen­tu­ry B.C.E.. Like­ly per­formed on an instru­ment resem­bling an ancient lyre, the so-called “Hur­ri­an Cult Song” or “Hur­ri­an Hymn No. 6” sounds oth­er­world­ly to our ears, although mod­ern-day musi­col­o­gists can only guess at the song’s tem­po and rhythm.

When we reach even fur­ther back in time, long before the advent of sys­tems of writ­ing, we are com­plete­ly at a loss as to the forms of music pre­his­toric humans might have pre­ferred. But we do know that music was like­ly a part of their every­day lives, as it is ours, and we have some sound evi­dence for the kinds of instru­ments they played. In 2008, arche­ol­o­gists dis­cov­ered frag­ments of flutes carved from vul­ture and mam­moth bones at a Stone Age cave site in south­ern Ger­many called Hohle Fels. These instru­ments date back 42,000 to 43,000 years and may sup­plant ear­li­er find­ings of flutes at a near­by site dat­ing back 35,000 years.

Image via the The Archae­ol­o­gy News Net­work

The flutes are metic­u­lous­ly craft­ed, reports Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly the mam­moth bone flute, which would have been “espe­cial­ly chal­leng­ing to make.” At the time of their dis­cov­ery, researchers spec­u­lat­ed that the flutes “may have been one of the cul­tur­al accom­plish­ments that gave the first Euro­pean mod­ern-human (Homo sapi­ens) set­tlers an advan­tage over their now extinct Nean­derthal-human (Homo nean­derthalen­sis) cousins.” But as with so much of our knowl­edge about Nean­derthals, includ­ing new evi­dence of inter­breed­ing with Homo sapi­ens, these con­clu­sions may have to be revised.

It is per­haps pos­si­ble that the much-under­es­ti­mat­ed Nean­derthals made their own flutes. Or so a 1995 dis­cov­ery of a flute made from a cave bear femur might sug­gest. Found by arche­ol­o­gist Ivan Turk in a Nean­derthal camp­site at Div­je Babe in north­west­ern Slove­nia, this instru­ment (above) is esti­mat­ed to be over 43,000 years old and per­haps as much as 80,000 years old. Accord­ing to musi­col­o­gist Bob Fink, the flute’s four fin­ger holes match four notes of a dia­ton­ic (Do, Re, Mi…) scale. “Unless we deny it is a flute at all,” Fink argues, the notes of the flute “are inescapably dia­ton­ic and will sound like a near-per­fect fit with­in ANY kind of stan­dard dia­ton­ic scale, mod­ern or antique.” To demon­strate the point, the cura­tor of the Sloven­ian Nation­al Muse­um had a clay repli­ca of the flute made. You can hear it played at the top of the post by Sloven­ian musi­cian Ljuben Dimkaros­ki.

The pre­his­toric instru­ment does indeed pro­duce the whole and half tones of the dia­ton­ic scale, so com­plete­ly, in fact, that Dimkaros­ki is able to play frag­ments of sev­er­al com­po­si­tions by Beethoven, Ver­di, Rav­el, Dvořák, and oth­ers, as well as some free impro­vi­sa­tions “mock­ing ani­mal voic­es.” The video’s YouTube page explains his choice of music as “a pot­pour­ri of frag­ments from com­po­si­tions of var­i­ous authors,” select­ed “to show the capa­bil­i­ties of the instru­ment, tonal range, stac­ca­to, lega­to, glis­san­do….” (Dimkaros­ki claims to have fig­ured out how to play the instru­ment in a dream.) Although arche­ol­o­gists have hot­ly dis­put­ed whether or not the flute is actu­al­ly the work of Nean­derthals, as Turk sug­gest­ed, should it be so, the find­ing would con­tra­dict claims that the close human rel­a­tives “left no firm evi­dence of hav­ing been musi­cal.” But what­ev­er its ori­gin, it seems cer­tain­ly to be a hominid artifact—not the work of predators—and a key to unlock­ing the pre­his­to­ry of musi­cal expres­sion.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Old­est Song in the World: A Sumer­ian Hymn Writ­ten 3,400 Years Ago

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Hear the “Seik­i­los Epi­taph,” the Old­est Com­plete Song in the World: An Inspir­ing Tune from 100 BC

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Most Dyla­nol­o­gists dis­agree about which is the sin­gle great­est song in Bob Dylan’s cat­a­log, but few would deny “Blind Willie McTell” a place high in the run­ning. It may come as a sur­prise — or, to those with a cer­tain idea of Dylan and his fan base, the exact oppo­site of a sur­prise — to learn that that song is an out­take, record­ed but nev­er quite com­plet­ed in the stu­dio and avail­able for years only in boot­leg form. “Blind Willie McTell” was a prod­uct of the ses­sions for what would become Infi­dels. Released in 1983, that album was received as some­thing of a return to form after the Chris­t­ian-themed tril­o­gy of Slow Train Com­ing, Saved, and Shot of Love that Dylan put out after being born again.

Of the mate­r­i­al offi­cial­ly includ­ed on Infi­dels, the great­est impact was prob­a­bly made by the album’s open­er “Jok­er­man,” at least in the punk ren­di­tion Dylan per­formed on Late Night with David Let­ter­man. Not that every Dyla­nol­o­gist is a fan of that song: in the Dai­ly Mav­er­ick, Drew For­rest calls it “ran­dom and inco­her­ent,” draw­ing an unfa­vor­able com­par­i­son with “Blind Willie McTell,” which is “sure to be remem­bered as one of Dylan’s most per­fect cre­ations.”

The sources of that per­fec­tion are many, as explained by Noah Lefevre in the new, near­ly 50-minute long Poly­phon­ic video above on this “unre­leased mas­ter­piece,” whose ori­gin and after­life under­score how thor­ough­ly Dylan inhab­its the musi­cal tra­di­tions from which he draws.

Like most major Dylan songs, “Blind Willie McTell” exists in sev­er­al ver­sions, but the one most lis­ten­ers know (offi­cial­ly released in 1991, eight years after its record­ing) fea­tures Mark Knopfler on twelve-string gui­tar and Dylan him­self on piano. Melod­i­cal­ly based on the jazz stan­dard “St. James Infir­mary Blues” and named after a real, pro­lif­ic musi­cian from Geor­gia, its sparse music and lyrics man­age to evoke a panoram­ic view encom­pass­ing the blues, the Bible, the ways of the old South, and indeed, the very his­to­ry of Amer­i­can music and slav­ery. Though Dylan him­self con­sid­ered the song unfin­ished, he came around to see its val­ue after hear­ing The Band work it into their show, and has by now per­formed it live him­self more than 200 times — none, in adher­ence to the pro­tean char­ac­ter of blues, folk, and jazz, quite the same as the last.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Mas­sive 55-Hour Chrono­log­i­cal Playlist of Bob Dylan Songs: Stream 763 Tracks

“Tan­gled Up in Blue”: Deci­pher­ing a Bob Dylan Mas­ter­piece

Hear the Uncen­sored Orig­i­nal Ver­sion of “Hur­ri­cane,” Bob Dylan’s Protest Song About Jailed Box­er Rubin “Hur­ri­cane” Carter (1976)

The Reli­gions of Bob Dylan: From Deliv­er­ing Evan­gel­i­cal Ser­mons to Singing Hava Nag­i­la With Har­ry Dean Stan­ton

How Bob Dylan Kept Rein­vent­ing His Song­writ­ing Process, Breath­ing New Life Into His Music

How Bob Dylan Cre­at­ed a Musi­cal & Lit­er­ary World All His Own: Four Video Essays

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.