Echoes

in the Dork
I
I' you have ever been into one of those preserved caves
I
t hat our prehistoric ancestors visited, you will know that
I I wo things usually happen at once. You are preffy quickly
:,rrrothered
in complete darkness, and you suddenly leave
l,t'ltind
the sound of the outside world. A blissful respite from
tlrt'troise
and bustle of modern life, you might think. In fact,
rl
's
fhr from silent and peaceful. As a listenirg experience, it
t ;l n cven be quite unnerving.
During the Middle and upper
palaeolithic,
some 40,000 to
.10,000 years ngo, small groups of men) women and children
-
Ncrrnderthals at first, then our most direct ancestors
-
would
It:tvc gathered near the entrances of caves across Western and
('cntral
Europe for shelter, and perhaps gone deep inside for rit-
rl:tls. These enclosed spaces have their own acoustic character:
Noise
echoing voices, of course) but also intensifyr.rg them. If you
visit them today, you will notice that every sound you make
as you walk through them lingers longer, reverberating,
and
coming back to you from unpredictable
clirections) thanks to
the irregular shape of the rvalls.I In cerrain places there is a
cacophony of echoes
-
each one lasting long enough to merge
with the next to create an almost continuous
wall of sound,
rich, complex and, to the untrained ear, pretty disorientating.
V\rhen we whisper, hum, speak or sing, they shout and sir
back to us. These caves are alive.
Perhaps it's not all that surprising that caves resonate. But
several archaeologists
have tried an experiment that reveals
something rather more remarkable.
Moving slowly, and in
total darkness, along the narrower passages of caves such as
Arcy-sur-Cure
in Burgundy, and Le Portel near the
pyrenees,
they have used their voices as a kind of sonar) sending out a
pulse of sound then listening out for any unusually ,.rorrr.r,
response. Most of us can do this, by the way: almost without
noticing it, we tend to use subtle cues such as variations in
loudness and variations in the time of arrirral at our ears of
different echoes to very srn iftly 'localise' sound
-
to navigate,
in fact, a bit like bats in the night sky.' The poinr, in any case)
is that when these archaeologists
felt the sound around them
suddenly changing, they would turn on their torches. And at
that precise point they u,ould often see on the wall or ceiling a
painting. This might be something as simple as a small dot of
red ochre- Or it could be more complex
-
a partern of lines,
a negative handprint, an animal.3 \4/hat is significanr is that
wherever a cave soun,d.smost interesting, you are also likely to
find the greatest concentration
of prehistoric art.
The first person to map in detail this srunning coincidence
of resonance and art was the musicologist
I6gor Reznikoff.
After walking carefully through the caverns and tunnels of
fucy-sur-Cure
for himself in the mid-I98Os, and making a
Echoes in the Dork
,1,r.rrl,',1 nrrlp of what he heard and saw, he reckoned that
rlr.rrr |i0
llcr
cent of the images are in spots where the acous-
rrr ', .u ('
l)iu'ticularly
unusual.a For example, near the bottom of
r , ,r\('(.rllcd the Grand Grotte, where each sound might pro-
i,rl. 1 ul) to scven echoes, there are paintings of several mam-
rrr,rlrs, st)nlc bears, a rhinoceros or two, a salmofl, some sort
,,1 t.rr .urd an ibex. And in a mezzanine area near the so-called
',.rllt
.lcs Vagues (the 'Hall of Waves'), just where the reso-
,,ur( (' is rcally striking, there's a ceiling densely packed with
,rrrr,rls <>f all kinds, and, on the floor, the delicate outline of
r l,n,l. At other caves there's the same pattern: at the cave
,,1 Nirrux in the Pyrenees, for instance, almost all the animal
;r.urrtings
are in the Salon Noir, which Reznikoff describes as
',,urrtling
like a richly resonant Romanesque chapel;s and at
l , l'ortel, a whole series of red dots runs along a ten-metre
riinrrcl, each one) again, precisely where) as Reznikoff puts it,
.r
'living
sound point lies'.6
Why didn't the artists who made these prehistoric paintings
rlorl( nearer the cave entrance, where there's much more space
.,,r.1 light| We don't know for sure: it's impossible to guess
rlrt'ir thoughts. But clearly sornetl,ti*g drew them to the dark-
r sl
,
cleepest and most inaccessible parts of each underground
t orrrpleX. Even prehistoric art that has been found outside
t .rVcs is sometimes located in inconvenient places: high on
t .utlor walls and cliff faces. Again, it's crowded on to some
sur-lhces while other rocks nearby are left strangely blank. And
.rqrrin, it's sound that seems to provide the link.
Go rock-art hunting in F{orseshoe Canyon, Utah, or in
I Iicroglyph Canyon, Lrrzona, for instance, and you'll find
rhlt those places with the greatest concentration of pictures
human figures) mountain sheep or deer
-
are exactly the
siltrre places where echoes are strongest or where sounds carry
lirrthest.T The connection between the sound quality of a par-
ticular spot and the art that is nearby just keeps cropping up.
Noise
so much so that it's a good guess that our prehistoric
artists
didn't select b)' ,..ident
those surfaces
-
whether
deep inside
a cave or high
'p
on a cliff
-
that created
the most interesting
acoustics'
They seem to have chosen them deliberately
-
as if
they couldn't
shake these echoes out of their mi,ds.
what, rhen, was going onf why did the sound of an ampli-
fied echo apparently
fascinate
prehistoric
peoples
so muchf
one clue has emerged
at the Music School in Cambridge,
where an intriguing
experimenr
was conducted
in 2000. The
musicologist
Ian Cross, the anthropologist
Ezra Zubrow a,d
the archaeologist
Frank cowan came together
in an open-air
courtyard
to practise
the prehistoric
craft of flint-knapping.
Bone pipes or flutes excavated
from various sites in Europe had
already shown that humans
were making music from about
36,000 years ago. But what about before thenl The three
investigators
wondered
if even older, stone objects might also
have been used to make music.s They tried holdirg
the flints
and striking
them in different
ways, and they soon discoverecl
an array of sounds courd indeed
be made.
It was impossible
to prove that these sounds
were actually
exploited
by prehistoric
peoples
for anything
we might recog-
nise as 'music'. But in the middle of all the testing somerhing
unexpected
happened.
A stone blade being held between
rwo
fingers was tapped,
and the three men in the courtyard
sud-
denly heard a high-pitched
flutter
-
rn hat sounded
very like
a bird nearby flying away from them. Though
they were out
of doors and in the full afternoon
sun, Ian Cross recalled
the
effect as being
'quite unearthly
... it seemed
that the tapping
had suddenly
awoken
some real yer invisible
entiry,
-
like an
avian spirit'e He knew there was a perfectly
good scientific
explanation
to hand: the shape of the courtyard,
the mix of
building
materials,
the ,o.rrrd produced,
the men,s position
_
all this had set up a paffiern
of souncl waves, which created a
moving, fluttering
echo with a life of its own. For ,fr. ,.rt of
Echoes in the Dork
tlr, .rltcnr(x)n they tapped the stone blade again and again,
urrl .1r,, ovcrcd that, given the right mix of circumstances)
tlr, 1
,,rultl l<ccp evoking the sound of a bird flying across the
r,urtl',u'rl.
'l'hcy
knew there was hard science behind the phe-
n,,rn( n()n. Ilut they claimed this 'did nothing to dispel the
,r,u,,r(.rl" .lualities'of the fluttering sound they'd created.I0
\\'lr.rt is nrost interesting about the Cambridge experiment
r'.n t
;ust
thc creation of a special effect. ft's the idea of an
ur\ r',r[,](' ilr)imal spirit having been unleashed through sound.
lrr l.rt l,:rt ltrauyprehistoric sites, echoes conjure up something
',uurl.u:
wlten a clap in a cave bounces back in a series of over-
l.r1'rnr!,, cclroes, it's not so much the cave that comes alive,
l,rrt tlrt'rtttirnals painted or engraved on the walls nearby. They
r'.rll,r1r :utcl stampede about, as if the sound of hooves really
\\ r r ('
t-ortring from within the walls themselves. The sound
r',rr't
iust
sharing its space with the image; it's rnirn'icking it.
(
)r
;,r'r'hrps
the image is mimicking the sound. At other times,
.r ,,isc rttade in one place appears to be answered from some-
rr lrt'r(' clsc entirely. Occasionally, a sound might seem to come
Ir,nr lrchind a rock rather than from its surface, as if its point
,,1 ,n'iuiu were deep within or the surfhce itself were a chi-
,r('rir. All these effects are uncanny. Prehistoric people would
Ir.r\'(' hrrcl no understanding of the science of sound waves and
rr'\'('r-trcration. For them any echo would surely have seemed
lrlir'rt ncw sound, coming from some invisible being or spirit
,.,,nrcthing, perhaps, from within the rock, speaking back,
rrr.rking its own presence felt.rr In other words, it would have
,r('
(' I r r cd sllpernatural.
Arrcl sure enough, if we look at different cultures around
tlrt' w<trld, time and time again we find myths involving super-
rr.rl rrrarl echoes
-
myths with their roots almost certainly deep
rrr prchistory. Among the Native American Paiute people, for
('x.rnrple,
there are stories of witches living among the rocks,
l.rking great delight in repeatirrg the words of passers-by.
Noise
Among
the cherokee,
there are countless
names for rocks that
'talk'' In southern
Africa,
the san Bush people,
who have been
producing
some
of the world's
greatest
rock art for thousands
of years'
often use images
showing
figures
and patterns
crawl-
itg out of the cracks
or holes
of the ,rorr.,
as if emerging
from
a teemi'g
spirit
world just
'behind' the surface.12
It,s hard to
resist
this thought:
that places
which
echoed
were special
-
'labelled'
by these painted
images
as being
full of spirits,
as
sacred
places.
There's
also an intriguirg
connection
with music,
and,
through
music,
to trance.
In san rock art, one recurring
image
is of human
figures
dancing
in a kind of ffance
srate;
others include
monsters,
fish, eels,
turtres and the erand.
The
archaeologist
David
Lewis-williams
believes
these paintings
might represent
the visions
of those in a ffance
-
what they
witnessed
when
they lifted
the
"'veil,, suspended
berw,een
this world
and the next'. The images
also make sense
because
they're
so often found
on the walls of rock shelters:
these
resonant
surfaces
walls that seem)
from
the sound
they
make, to be inhabited
-
are) in effect,
the very gateways
to
this spiritual
realm.r3
so perhaps
prehistoric
people,
when
they wenr into caves
like the ones at Arcy-sur-cure,
Le
portel
and
Niaux, weren,t
just
there to stand passively,
transfixed
in wonder
at the sffange
sounds
stirred
up by their presence.
They might
have been
going
in to actively
inpohe
a spirit
world,
to be in dialogue
with it through
creating
their o*r, noise and listening
to the
results:
rapping
flints, perhxps,
ro ser off fluttering
echoes,
or
even hitting
a pillar
of rock.
we can hear musical
stones
being plays6
across
the rn orlcl:
the 'pichanchalassi'
lithophone
(o. ,rr.rri.d
stone)
i, Togo,
'go"g rocks'in
Namibia,
and 'ringing
rocks,
in southern
India,
Scandinavia
and North Ameri.".in
In one way or another,
the
sound
of the lithophone
is ubiquitous
-
and probably
has been
Echoes in the Dork
f *,r 111,',1 ,I lrurtuur history. So it's perfectly possible that these
rltt;,1s11'',,urt.ls rt>uld also have been drifting through Euro-
1,,
lr r r\ r
..
l('nsi of thOuSandS Of yeafs agO.
t , rr,rrrl\,, irr caves at Roucadour, Cougnac and Pech-Merle
I* I r urt r
,
,rl Ncrja in Spain and at Escoural in Portugal, there
*, r,r l,
l,ill,u's
dccorated with red dots and bearing all the
lr rrl,', ,,1 lrt'ing repeatedly hit. Some of them even give off
,lrll, r, rrtll'lritchcd sounds when struck.Is These are also the
, ri,'. tlr.rl lt:tvc left behind some of the world's oldest surviv-
rrr;r r,'rr',r,.lI instruments, the bone pipes or flutes mentioned
r rrlrr r
r"
ll lirttndin caves, theywere probablyplayed in caves.
Irr,l, , .1, s()ntc of the very oldest bone flutes, discovered at
I t r r rl z rrr t ltc Pyrenees) were found next to a decorated pillar,
l r t lr, , ,rrt' cltamber that amplified sound more than any other
l,rrt
,,1 tlrc cave. They are yet more evidence that some kind
,,1 nnr',r( wlls an important element in what hurnans did in
,rr I'
l,l.rt'cs
ronghly 20,000 years ago during the Upper Pal-
r, r rlrrlut..
Ilut prehistoric people didn't really n.eed. to 'invent'
lrr rrt
;ripcs
in order to make music in here. They already had
t.,r'
lrilllrs
to hit, their o\
In
voices and, of course) the won-
,lr r lrrl r.r'sonance ofthe caves or rock shelters themselves. Flere,
, r t lr,' tlrtrk, with only the flickerirg half-light of their lamps
,r l.t;tu-s, the atmosphere would surely have been perfect for
rrru.rls or cclebrations, for music and singing, for summoning
tlr, slrl)cntatural.
I rr t hc rnidst of such apparent magic, our ancestors must
I r.rvt' wlnted to keep making sound, if only to keep the conver-
',.rtr,rr
with the spiritu,orld going too. So we can begin to see
tlr.tl thrcugh noise we evolved. In a continuous feed-forward
l.,1r, ncw sounds, tonal effects, notes and rhythms were dis-
t { r\,1'r'r:cl.
They were tried out, they echoed back, they were
. ,1ricd, altered, replayed, thousands of times, over and over
.rl,,.rin. And, eventually from chaos emerged order.rT
(
)l'course) all this chanting and playing wasn't just
about
8
Noise
communicating with a spirit world. Often, it was about com-
munication benveen living people in this world
-
about men
and women and children doing something together in rime,
about bonding, sharirg. Which is why to help us understand
the distant origins of both language and family life, we have
to turn to the beat of African drums.
2
Ihe Beot of Drums
,r-a.
nc of the great treasures of the British Library's
I I
1;.r,.rtd archive is a scratchy wax-cylinder recordi'g,
\-/ nrade tnl92l by Captain Robert Sutherland Rattray,
r tlr rrrslr colonial administrator.
He lived among the Ashanti
l,{
( ,l,lt' 6f
(lhana,
and wanted to capture a particularly remark-
rl,l, .rspcct of their lifestyle. His recording is one of the very
r,rlrt.sr rnacle of the'talking drums'of Africa
-
drums made
,rt ,l'trcc trunks and struck with twro wooden sticks, one in
r,rr lr lurrrd. The drum itself is hollowed out, so that its shell is
l. tr rlrickcr on one side than the other.
]ust
as Morse code is
irr.r(lt. sp of dots and dashes, the talking drum gives out a high
r,,(-
( )r a low tone, depending on where exactly it's beittg hit.
,'\
1,r'ccise
combination of these different tones makes up the
ir r(-ssrrlTc, which then travels tike a Morse-code signal pulsing
r0