Quote Originally Posted by neloon View Post
First programme seemed quite reasonable given the need to keep the casual viewer's attention. After all, Phil C. is the Royal Scottish Conservatoire's Artistic Director for the BA degree in Scottish Music. A good spread of pipes from Greece, Bulgaria, Estonia, Italy, Galicia, France and, of course, Ireland.
Alan
Do they suggest a point of origin?

As I alluded to, scientific rigour never seems to be applied to "bagpipe history".

What one hears over and over are things like the bagpipes had a "middle eastern" origin, and that they were played in ancient Egypt or what have you.

Needless to say there's no evidence for any such stuff.

It's very enlightening to apply the age-area hypothesis to the bagpipe. This is the concept which makes it obvious that modern humans had a African origin, and would make it obvious to a researcher who knew nothing of history but only examined the current distribution of English that Britain is its home.

It's the notion that when you come across a thing that has very little variation across a wide area that the thing was introduced recently and spread rapidly, and when a thing has a huge number of variations in a small area that that is the probably point of origin. (Look at DNA in Africa vs the rest of the world, or English in Australia vs Britain.)

This principle suggests not only that the bagpipes didn't originate in "the middle east" but rather was introduced there fairly recently: virtually the same species of bagpipe exists, with very little variation, from the Atlantic shore of North Africa all the way into India.

The area of greatest variation is Europe. The greatest variation in Europe is in France and in the Balkans.