Sometime around 35,000 years ago, in what is now Germany, a man or woman sat down and undertook the task of fashioning a flute from a griffon vulture bone.
The flute was recently found. The melody is lost.
But just as archeologists have been able to piece together the eight sections of bone found in a cave, we can piece together at least a little of the story. Stone Age life was hard, all the more so in the overlapping ice age.
Survival was a daily uncertainty. Food had to be gathered, hunted, fished. Farming was 20,000 years in the future. Protection from the weather? Animal skins, caves.
There cannot have been much in the way of leisure. Certainly nothing in life obliged the creation of any word for frivolity. Yet someone took the time and care to hollow that bone and to drill five spaced holes in it so that music could be fashioned.
The body's needs must be met or it will perish. The soul, too, has needs that must be met, lest it wither and our very humanity with it. So instrumental music, quite deliberately wrought, now joins as a contemporary the earliest drawings and paintings that chance has privileged us to see.
Indeed, in the same cave near Ulm where the flute was found, and of the same age, were paintings of animals and the carved figurine of a busty nude.
The findings at Hohle Fels Cave add to humankind's store of its most ancient treasures — the famous cave paintings of Chauvet in France, 32,000 years old; the Furmane Cave paintings near Italy's Verona, at least 32,000 years old, some think perhaps 36,000 years old; the pictures of bison and the erotic drawings at Cussac in France's Dordogne Valley, dated 37,000 years old.
These, we now can understand, are root markers of civilization and it is telling that we find them in a time long before humans had puzzled out agriculture or commerce even in their crudest forms, the usual benchmarks for civilization.
Here and there, pockets of Neanderthals still held out. Yet the impulse to create — to paint, to draw, to sculpt, to make music and, if to make music, then surely to dance, too — was so strong that it was asserting itself when no circumstance would seem to have favored it.
Today's anti-tax groups and local school boards to the contrary notwithstanding, our most ancient progenitors did not dismiss the arts as frills, not even in our kind's toughest times. Apparently there has been something in us from the beginning that has felt compelled to reach through the mundane and feel around for the transcendent.
Transient or enduring, from the moment's solace of a pleasing ditty to a lifetime's afterimage from a painting that remained in mind long after the retina was done with it, we have made our culture from the work of that impulse.
Whatever simple music it was that was played on that bone turned into a flute, and however tentatively it may have been played, in time it became Bach's B-minor Mass, Mozart's Requiem, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Maybe the melody wasn't lost after all.
Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He is based in Atlanta. E-mail: teepencolumn(at)earthlink.net.
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