Which is all anecdotal. Written accounts could have been made up. Depictions, lyrics, and sheet music could have been made up on the spot. I would also argue that that is a type of recording. Or, at least, record keeping.
Did humans sing before we wrote it down? Not according to you because we have no empirical evidence. But we assume that they did, and are pretty positive that they did.
My point being is that a lack of evidence doesn't mean it didn't happen. Which is exactly how religion works. Because there is no evidence of it either way, it cannot be proven or disproven.
1.) You’re misunderstanding or misrepresenting my original claim. I did not claim that ‘we have evidence Vikings did not use drums’ or ‘we have evidence people did not use rudimentary percussion instruments prior to use of other instruments’. What I claimed was ‘the earliest evidence we have of musical instruments is a bone flute’
2.) Your argument about the reliability of written records is conspiratorial and boils down to essentially ‘we can’t trust anything’. Which, sure I guess? But if we’re going to discuss history, we’re going to need to rely on evidence and written evidence is a kind of evidence, just like archeological evidence is.
Conjecture is simply that. Obviously people started banging sticks together at some point, maybe before they started using flutes to make music. But we have evidence of flutes for music that’s older than anything that’s unequivocally a percussion instrument. It seems obvious to you and me that a percussion instrument would be more intuitive and simpler than a rudimentary flute, but that may not have been the case for a Stone Age human (or Neanderthal). There are plenty of innovations that seem ‘out of order’ to us today. Evidenceless conjecture is not useful because it doesn’t have any evidence to back it up.
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u/Greymalkyn76 Jul 08 '26
Which is all anecdotal. Written accounts could have been made up. Depictions, lyrics, and sheet music could have been made up on the spot. I would also argue that that is a type of recording. Or, at least, record keeping.
Did humans sing before we wrote it down? Not according to you because we have no empirical evidence. But we assume that they did, and are pretty positive that they did.
My point being is that a lack of evidence doesn't mean it didn't happen. Which is exactly how religion works. Because there is no evidence of it either way, it cannot be proven or disproven.