I just finished the Goddall/BBC "Story of Music". It's really well done, but until they get to the 800s it's all very loosey goosey feeling, history-wise. Understandably- they didn't even have the ability to write music down in a reproducible way before then.

He makes the claim in the beginning of the first episode that the paintings at Lascaux were found to be located in the at "the places of maximum resonance"- that throughout cave system, it's tunnels and passages, by standing in front of the paintings and "singing" you can be heard over the entire complex. So he said the theory was it was a kind of echo location.

But I'm confused- how on earth do we know they were "singing"? How do we know they weren't yelling out whatever cro magnon man was using to mean "Hey, Bob, over here!". Or drumming, for that matter? Or blowing pipes (there are pipe blowing figures in the paintings at Lascaux). And what does any of it have to do with putting the paintings themselves in those places?

tl;dr: Lascaux, ancient music, and Howard Goddall (nothing against him, he's great). This feels like horse crap. Is it horse crap?

Do we have any idea how "music" started?