From the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, a map showing where the world's most used crops originated. Potatoes and tomatoes are from the Andes, watermelon from southern Africa, bananas from south & southeast Asia, and blueberries from North America. (via @CharlesCMann)

The title is borrowed from Paul Krugman, writing in the New York Times in relation to the Paris attacks of November 13th, 2015. In it, the dear Professor offers a straight up assessment of the situation:

So what was Friday’s attack about? Killing random people in restaurants and at concerts is a strategy that reflects its perpetrators’ fundamental weakness. It isn’t going to establish a caliphate in Paris. What it can do, however, is inspire fear — which is why we call it terrorism, and shouldn’t dignify it with the name of war.

The point is not to minimize the horror. It is, instead, to emphasize that the biggest danger terrorism poses to our society comes not from the direct harm inflicted, but from the wrong-headed responses it can inspire.

It's easy to look upon the images on the news, and sit, in real-time, on Twitter and Facebook as the events unfurl in front of us.  We end up aghast.  It is easy to let that initial response be our de facto position on this tragedy.  But it is not a sustainable position.

Or, we can tut-tut those who fail to feel equally bad about the tragedies that occur in other nations of the world, including those not often covered by our for-profit, grab-all-headlines-at-any-cost news networks. This approach is also not helpful in any manner other than to allow us to feel more worldly and more informed than others. It does nothing to address the responses others felt as they watched the violence erupt in a city that is culturally significant to many people who don't call France home.

What happened is first and foremost a tragedy, and sadness and disgust are understandable responses.  But we do get to choose how to move on from it.  "Fear" as a response, as Krugman reminds us, is exactly what the perpetrators want. This is evil, through and through.

However, just as evil, is the leveraging of these events for political gain, and to use the pain and sadness of others to justify a position that is at odds with our own. Fear allows this leveraging just as much as seeing the world through some fundamentalist lens.

So what is the proper response to these and other similar events? From my own perspective, I mourn the losses, and understand what is being attacked. Look at the places attacked - a football game, a full restaurant, a rock concert - and ask the following:

"Should I not go to sporting events, concerts, or a restaurant, in order to be perfectly safe?"

All of these places are culturally significant to a great many of us. Do we really want to alter our enjoyment of these places because some fundamentalist with a chip on their shoulder thinks we should feel less safe?

Now let's expand that question a bit - Do we really want to allow these people to alter our behaviors just because they reminded us that life is fragile?  This insight their act provided isn't new to anyone.

From where I am sitting, the only response to these atrocities is to be sad, be brave, and be a citizen of the world. At its core, we are all entitled to what the entirety of life has to offer, regardless of what an idiot with a gun and a dogmabelieve.

Back in July of last year, we brought you a transcription and a couple of audio interpretations of the oldest known song in the world, discovered in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit and dating back to the 14th century B.C.E.. Likely performed on an instrument resembling an ancient lyre, the so-called “Hurrian Cult Song” or “Hurrian Hymn No. 6” sounds otherworldly to our ears, although modern-day musicologists can only guess at the song’s tempo and rhythm.

When we reach even further back in time, long before the advent of systems of writing, we are completely at a loss as to the forms of music prehistoric humans might have preferred. But we do know that music was likely a part of their everyday lives, as it is ours, and we have some sound evidence for the kinds of instruments they played. In 2008, archeologists discovered fragments of flutes carved from vulture and mammoth bones at a Stone Age cave site in southern Germany called Hohle Fels. These instruments date back 42,000 to 43,000 years and may supplant earlier findings of flutes at a nearby site dating back 35,000 years.

The flutes are meticulously crafted, reports National Geographic, particularly the mammoth bone flute, which would have been “especially challenging to make.” At the time of their discovery, researchers speculated that the flutes “may have been one of the cultural accomplishments that gave the first European modern-human (Homo sapiens) settlers an advantage over their now extinct Neanderthal-human (Homo neanderthalis) cousins.” But as with so much of our knowledge about Neanderthals, including new evidence of interbreeding with Homo Sapiens, these conclusions may have to be revised.

Image via the The Archaeology News Network

It is perhaps possible that the much-underestimated Neanderthals made their own flutes. Or so a 1995 discovery of a flute made from a cave bear femur might suggest. Found by archeologist Ivan Turk in a Neanderthal campsite at Divje Babe in northwestern Slovenia, this instrument (above) is estimated to be over 43,000 years old and perhaps as much as 80,000 years old. According to musicologist Bob Fink, the flute’s four finger holes match four notes of a diatonic (Do, Re, Mi…) scale. “Unless we deny it is a flute at all,” Fink argues, the notes of the flute “are inescapably diatonic and will sound like a near-perfect fit within ANY kind of standard diatonic scale, modern or antique.” To demonstrate the point, the curator of the Slovenian National Museum had a clay replica of the flute made. You can hear it played at the top of the post by Slovenian musician Ljuben Dimkaroski.

The prehistoric instrument does indeed produce the whole and half tones of the diatonic scale, so completely, in fact, that Dimkaroski is able to play fragments of several compositions by Beethoven, Verdi, Ravel, Dvořák, and others, as well as some free improvisations “mocking animal voices.” The video’s Youtube page explains his choice of music as “a potpourri of fragments from compositions of various authors,” selected “to show the capabilities of the instrument, tonal range, staccato, legato, glissando….” (Dimkaroski claims to have figured out how to play the instrument in a dream.) Although archeologists have hotly disputed whether or not the flute is actually the work of Neanderthals, as Turk suggested, should it be so, the finding would contradict claims that the close human relatives “left no firm evidence of having been musical.” But whatever its origin, it seems certainly to be a hominid artifact—not the work of predators—and a key to unlocking the prehistory of musical expression.

Related Content:

Listen to the Oldest Song in the World: A Sumerian Hymn Written 3,400 Years Ago

What Ancient Greek Music Sounded Like: Hear a Reconstruction That is ‘100% Accurate’

Hear The Epic of Gilgamesh Read in the Original Akkadian and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness