re Neanderthal flute/Babylonian tuning

Dan: Granted the tuning tablets are silent on what kind of fifths are
used to tune the harp, but what kind do you imagine were tuned on rather
crude instruments in the 2nd millennium BCE? As for Pythagoreanism, I
would define any tuning system by fifths (and/or fourths) and octaves as
basically pythagorean in the absence of any data on tempering or
tweaking to get better consonances. There is reason to believe that
Pythagoras learned of tuning by fifths from either the Babylonians or
Egyptians, both of whom had been in close cultural contact with the
Greeks for centuries. I suspect his only contribution to tuning lore was
the use of numbers to describe intervals as the inverse relation between
string lengths and pitch was surely known already.

As Babylonian arithmetic was highly developed, it is possible that using
numbers to indicate intervals may have been known already, though there
is no direct evidence for this

Taken literally, the Babylonians seemed to check their tuning by
listening to the thirds or sixths. I don't find it unbelievable that
they considered the pythagorean intervals to the be the norm rather than
the 5-limit ones we might prefer. (comments?, Margo)

My comments re musical universals were in directed toward the web pages
whose URLs were posted earlier.

--John