World's Oldest Musical Instrument Found

As the father of a flute player, I found this news item interesting:

Scientists say they've found what they consider to be the earliest handcrafted musical instrument in a cave in southwest Germany, less than a yard away from the oldest-known carving of a human. The flute fragments as well as the ivory figurine of a "prehistoric Venus" date back more than 35,000 years, the researchers report.

The findings, published online today by the journal Nature, suggest not only that cavemen and cavewomen could rock the house, but that musical jam sessions may have helped modern humans prevail over their Neanderthal cousins.

"The bottom-line issues are demographics, but behind the demographics are other factors," said Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tubingen and the Nature paper's lead author.

Researchers know that modern humans prevailed over Neanderthals in Europe 20,000 to 35,000 years ago, and that the principal factors behind the Neanderthals' disappearance probably included culture and climate as well as diet. Conard and his colleagues - Maria Malina of the Heidelberg Academy of Science and Susanne Munzel of the University of Tubingen - argue that the musical tradition fostered by Homo sapiens may have contributed by bonding communities more closely together.

"Modern humans seemed to have had much larger social networks," Conard told me today. That networking may have helped facilitate "the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans relative to culturally more conservative and demographically more isolated Neanderthal populations," he and his colleagues wrote.

The fact that multiple musical instruments turned up in the same area, not far from other artistic artifacts, strengthens the argument that Paleolithic humans developed a relatively rich culture, the researchers say.

Four flutes found
In all, researchers report finding the fragments of four flutes at two excavations in an area of southwestern Germany known as Swabia. Three of the sets of fragments were carved from mammoth ivory, but the real prize is a nearly complete flute hollowed out from the bone of a griffon vulture. That specimen was found in the Hohle Fels cave, just 28 inches (70 centimeters) away from the spot where the prehistoric Venus (or, as some wags have put it, "prehistoric porn") was found.

The figurine's discovery was announced in May, but both finds were actually made last September. "First came the Venus, and a couple of weeks later came the flutes," Conard said.

When assembled, the vulture-bone flute is about eight and a half inches long (21.8 centimeters long) and boasts five finger holes. There are fine lines cut into the bone around the holes, suggesting that the flute's maker was calibrating the holes' placement to produce the nicest tones. One end of the flute is cut into a V shape, and the musician probably blew into that side of the flute. The researchers assume that an inch or two of the flute's far end is missing.

You can hear what the flute might have sounded like in this MP3 audio clip.

You could poke holes in a drain pipe and my daughter could probably play it.