Music in Prehistoric times

« I do not think there is a population without music; probably it never existed »

Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Quinzaine littéraire, august 1st, 1978

 

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     Music is the art of combining, harmonizing, sounds and silences, rhythmically as to their placement in time. If it has existed in all forms of culture since the Upper Paleolithic (about 35,000 BP) to present times, research during the last decade has amply demonstrated that musical involvement is a fundamental and determining feature of human specie. What are the factors that could testify to a certain musicality in the Upper Paleolithic within Human ? We present here, through the analysis of various research works that have already been published, various factors showing that the notion of "music" accompanies human prehistory, whether in its evolution, in its rites, its cultures or within material creations.