Written music — in its modern form

Talk about “oldies” music! Scientists recently uncovered the oldest musical instruments, in the form of carved bone and ivory flutes. The pieces were found in Germany and are at least 35,000 years old. Whoever the early modern humans were who made these musical instruments, they clearly had what we’re calling the human spark! The ephemeral music that our ancient ancestors made of course never made it into the fossil record. But these objects hint at the sophistication of their cultural lives. The flutes are also important because they suggest a major difference between modern humans and Neanderthals – both of whom lived in Europe during this time period. Theories abound to explain why music first emerged: does it relate to our cognitive skills like language, or was it used to attract mates, or to build group unity and social cohesion? Why do you think people played these flutes so many thousands of years ago?

• “New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany”
  Read the abstract of the scientific paper in Nature.
• Boston.com: “Archaeologists unearth oldest musical instruments ever found”
  This article includes a link to a sound clip of a tune on a reproduction flute.
• Cosmiclog: “Music for Cavemen“
• Wall Street Journal: “Magic Flute: Primal Find Sings of Music’s Mystery”
  This article focuses on music’s correlation with the human spark.

Robin Dunbar at the 2008 Nobel Conference

Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota hosted a conference last October focused squarely on the idea of “The Human Spark.” In fact, throughout our travels, the show’s production team met with many of the conference’s speakers! Webcasts of each presentation are available online for the general public.

Robin Dunbar from the University of Oxford discusses the social brain theory and what sets human beings apart from other apes.

Curtis Marean from Arizona State University talks about the implications of his archaeological work along the coast of South Africa for our understanding of human origins – not just anatomically modern humans, but modern behavior too.

Svante Pääbo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology presents the implications of his work sequencing the Neanderthal genome.

Apache Junction, AZ

We spent this weekend in Arizona, filming by the light of a blazing campfire (and a literal truckload of lights, including our very own moon) a conversation Alan had with archeologist Curtis Marean about how modern humans came to replace the Neanderthals — who’d been doing quite nicely until our ancestors decided to leave Africa and check out Europe.

Keeping warm by the campfire in the chilly desert night air, he and Curtis had a great time together chatting about what our ancestors brought with them to Europe that enabled them to replace its then-inhabitants, the Neanderthals. Not what they brought in their hands, but in their heads — basically a more flexible approach to making a living and a greater capacity for cooperation among themselves. This emphasis on our social nature will be a major theme of The Human Spark.

– Graham Chedd

Here’s Director Larry Engel talking about his plan for filming this nighttime desert scene… and a glimpse of how it all looked in the end.

Neanderthal reconstruction Photo: Stefan Scheer, Neanderthal Museum, Mettman, Germany

There were thousands of years that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens inhabited the same regions in Europe. How much did these groups intermingle?

One answer comes from looking at early human DNA… Does it contain any genetic traces of interbreeding with Neanderthals?

The answer, apparently is no. The scientists behind a recent study published in the journal Cell sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of a Neanderthal who lived 38,000 years ago.

While the scientists have been congratulated for the feat — it’s difficult to build a reliable sequence using ancient DNA — the results show no evidence of intermingling.

Get the full story here.

Tanya Smith shows 3-D images of Neanderthal teeth photo © Larry Engel, 2008

Graham Chedd here. Last time, I was telling you about our visit to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility – and about the trouble I got into there.

We’d come to the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility at the invitation of Tanya Smith, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (where there’s a lot of very cool Human Spark-type research going on, so we’ll be filming there later). Tanya is an expert on teeth, which as she points out are by far the most durable parts of our bodies – in fact they are practically fossilized as they grow. What’s more – and I found this astonishing when she first told me – teeth have daily growth lines hidden inside them, much like tree rings, which can reveal their owner’s early life history – and how quickly they grew up.

Here’s Tanya, alongside some 3-D images of Neanderthal teeth.

Peering inside teeth to see those growth rings needs very powerful X-ray beams – beams millions of times stronger than you get from your dentist. That’s where the synchrotron comes in. And because the X-rays are so potent they are also deadly, which is why there are all sorts of safety precautions. For instance, we were allowed inside the synchrotron while the beam was turned off for routine maintenance for an hour or so, and we were all given special little keys. The synchrotron can’t be turned on until all these keys are returned and in their little locks.

The Emergency Stop button photo © Larry Engel, 2008

There are also big buttons like this everywhere…

including in the room where the teeth were actually scanned. Now, before the beam is activated the room it has to be cleared of people, and to make sure the room is thoroughly checked, there are buttons in the corners that have to be pushed. I volunteered to push one of these buttons – and pushed this one.

Of course, it was the wrong one (pretty obvious now, but at the time… not so much). An eerie silence fell as the entire facility, except for the lights, shut down.

After a moment of shocked disbelief (“What did you do!?”), Paul Tafforeau, who is Tanya’s collaborator at the ESRF, recovered his composure and set about informing the authorities what had happened and getting everything back up and running again. He even forgave me (sort of) and no one came to haul me away.

Here’s Paul, with another set of Neanderthal teeth, these from a child.

Paul Tafforeau examines a set of Neanderthal teeth photo © Larry Engel, 2008

This fossil has a fascinating story, and one we’ll tell in the show, because it was the first Neanderthal fossil ever discovered, in 1829, long before Neanderthals were officially recognized and named, and long before Darwin suggested that humans had evolved.

We don’t yet know what Paul and Tanya found out from the scans. That’s going to take several months of careful growth ring counting and analysis. But we do know they were happy with the images they got, and that by the time we get to putting together our program, they’ll be able to tell us how quickly these Neanderthal children grew up.

Next we’re off to the University of Oregon in Eugene, where we’ll find out what parts of Alan’s brain provide him with a couple of uniquely human skills – his facility with language, and the ability to use a screwdriver….

I just hope there are no big red buttons.

Belgian archeologist Michel Toussaint, with the Neanderthal skull photo © Larry Engel, 2008

Hi, I’m Graham Chedd, who with Alan Alda first came up with the idea for The Human Spark a couple of years ago. We’ve just finished our first shoot, so this is a good moment to begin what will be a regular series of blogs as the production makes its way to your PBS station, we hope some time next year.

Alan will chime in soon. But on this first shoot, while I was in Grenoble, France, filming a 50,000 year-old Neanderthal skull getting its teeth X-rayed, Alan was lying in a tube in Los Angeles having his head scanned – so that we can all peer into his brain later.

Here’s Belgian archaeologist Michel Toussaint holding the fragile Neanderthal skull at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble. Normally it resides under lock and key at the national archaeology museum in Paris. The photo was taken by Larry Engel, by the way. Larry is The Human Spark’s director, and will also be the cameraman for most of the filming

The big question we’re trying to answer in the first show of The Human Spark is how, when, where and why we got to be who we are from who we used to be. Humans that looked much like us existed some 200,000 years ago, but the first obvious evidence of people with minds like ours – people we’d recognize as us – dates to about 35,000 years ago, when they started painting the walls of caves in Europe, like the famous Lascaux caves in France. We want to know where these people – and their minds – came from.

More on that in later blogs (hint: much of the story takes place in Africa). But this first shoot was with researchers seeking the answer to a simple question: how long did it take Neanderthals to grow up?

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility photo © Larry Engel, 2008

Neanderthals had been living in Europe and getting along just fine for at least 100,000 years before our ancestors showed up. Then the Neanderthals disappeared. Just how and why we replaced them – what gave us the edge – is one of the most fascinating mysteries of archeology, and one we’ll be diving into in this show. But one intriguing idea is that our ancestors had longer childhoods than did Neanderthals, and so more time to absorb all the complicated stuff we need to learn.

So how do you find out how quickly Neanderthals grew up? That’s where this machine comes in – a giant particle accelerator that generates one of the most powerful and concentrated beam of X-rays in the world – and a machine that I managed, in an act of stunning stupidity, to shut down entirely.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. More on that next time.