The Cave Bear: Imagining the First Trumpet

by Chris Hasselbring
On a recent visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, we came face-to-face with an enormous cave bear (Ursus spelaeus).
 
In Around the World in Twenty-One Trumpets, Ragnar's very first trumpet was made from the femur of a cave bear, and I was struck by how closely the bone in the book's illustration resembles the real thing.

A human beside a mounted European cave bear at the American Museum of Natural History, New York City.

 The museum exhibit provides some fascinating historical context for Ragnar's story. Cave bears inhabited Europe during the last Ice Age, and tens of thousands of their remains have been discovered in caves, where many apparently died during hibernation. Prehistoric humans also used caves for shelter, so these enormous animals may have been formidable competitors for the same spaces.

Ursus spelaeus (Cave-dwelling Bear)

Cave Bear Femur

That brings us to the opening of the book. Ragnar, a fictional prehistoric toolmaker, is sorting through a collection of animal bones when he picks up a hollow bear femur and blows through it to clear out some dust. Experimenting with different sounds, he eventually buzzes his lips into the bone and produces a sudden, eerie, resonant noise that startles him. But he cannot reproduce it and does not yet understand how he made it.

That night, Ragnar dreams that a bear has entered his cave and is approaching a sleeping child. Suddenly, that strange sound emanates from the recesses of the cave, frightening the bear away. The dream gives him a reason to try again: perhaps this sound could help protect others. The next morning, he returns to the bone and experiments until he learns to reproduce the sound reliably.

There is a science-of-sound connection here, too. To produce a sustained, resonant tone, Ragnar’s vibrating lips must work together with the air inside the bone near one of its natural resonant frequencies. Sound waves traveling and reflecting inside the hollow bone reinforce one another, establishing a standing wave. Finding that response once by accident is one thing; learning how to produce it again takes experimentation.

It's an imagined origin story for the trumpet: an accidental discovery that becomes something useful through curiosity and experimentation.
 
So far, no cave bear bone dating to this period appears to have been identified by archaeologists as a possible trumpet. Other prehistoric finds, including bird bones and mammoth ivory, have been identified as flutes. A cave bear femur discovered in Slovenia has also been interpreted as a possible flute, although that interpretation remains debated.
 
Prehistoric toolmakers developed an intimate understanding of the materials around them—bone, stone, wood, and horn—through handling, shaping, and experimenting with them. It's not difficult to imagine how that same familiarity and curiosity could have led someone to discover the acoustic possibilities of a hollow bone.

Explore the story

Listen to the opening of Around the World in Twenty-One Trumpets on the Brass Odyssey website, where Ragnar’s discovery comes to life.

Bring the museum into your classroom

Download our free classroom discussion guide, featuring museum photographs, background information, and questions to help you lead conversations about natural history, human ingenuity, and the science of sound.

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