The oldest instruments we can hold in our hands are flutes carved from bone, found in caves in southern Germany and reckoned to be around forty thousand years old. They are astonishing objects, drilled and shaped with real care, proof that people were making deliberate music deep in the Paleolithic. But the honest way to open the story of music is to admit that these flutes are not the beginning. They are only the oldest thing that happened to survive.

Almost certainly there was music long before them, and probably much simpler music: sticks struck together, stones knocked in rhythm, rattles of seed and shell, hands clapped and voices raised. Instruments like those leave almost nothing behind. Wood rots away to nothing over tens of thousands of years, and a stone used to keep a beat looks, to any archaeologist who finds it, exactly like a stone. The earliest music was made from materials that time erases and from gestures that leave no trace at all, so the record we have is not the first music but the first music sturdy enough to last.

That is why the exhibit calls this the missing first chapter. We can date the bone flutes, admire their craft, even guess at the scales they might have played, but everything before them is a silence we cannot fill. The instruments that would tell us how music actually started were the ones least likely to endure, and so the true opening of the human relationship with sound is lost, not because it did not happen but because it was made of perishable things. Music's history, told faithfully, begins with an apology: the first pages are gone, and the flutes are merely the oldest ones we were lucky enough to keep.