How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

few years after the paintings in Arcy-sur-Cure were discovered, a music ethnographer from the University of Paris named Iegor Reznikoff began studying the caves the way a bat would: by listening to the echoes and reverberations created in different parts of the cave complex. It had long been apparent that the Neanderthal images were clustered in specific parts of the cave, with some of the most ornate and dense images appearing more than a kilometer deep. Reznikoff determined that the paintings were consistently placed at the most acoustically interesting parts of the cave, the places where the reverberation was the most profound. If you make a loud sound standing beneath the images of Paleolithic animals at the far end of the Arcy-sur-Cure caves, you hear seven distinct echoes of your voice. The reverberation takes almost five seconds to die down after your vocal chords stop vibrating. Acoustically, the effect is not unlike the famous “wall of sound” technique that Phil Spector used on the 1960s records he produced for artists such as the Ronettes and Ike and Tina Turner.