Hear the World’s Oldest Instrument, the “Neanderthal Flute,” Dating Back Over 43,000 Years

Back in July of last year, we brought you a tran­scrip­tion and a cou­ple of audio inter­pre­ta­tions of the old­est known song in the world, dis­cov­ered in the ancient Syr­i­an city of Ugar­it and dat­ing back to the 14th cen­tu­ry B.C.E.. Like­ly per­formed on an instru­ment resem­bling an ancient lyre, the so-called “Hur­ri­an Cult Song” or “Hur­ri­an Hymn No. 6” sounds oth­er­world­ly to our ears, although mod­ern-day musi­col­o­gists can only guess at the song’s tem­po and rhythm.

When we reach even fur­ther back in time, long before the advent of sys­tems of writ­ing, we are com­plete­ly at a loss as to the forms of music pre­his­toric humans might have pre­ferred. But we do know that music was like­ly a part of their every­day lives, as it is ours, and we have some sound evi­dence for the kinds of instru­ments they played. In 2008, arche­ol­o­gists dis­cov­ered frag­ments of flutes carved from vul­ture and mam­moth bones at a Stone Age cave site in south­ern Ger­many called Hohle Fels. These instru­ments date back 42,000 to 43,000 years and may sup­plant ear­li­er find­ings of flutes at a near­by site dat­ing back 35,000 years.

bone flute

Image via the The Archae­ol­o­gy News Net­work

The flutes are metic­u­lous­ly craft­ed, reports Nation­al Geo­graph­ic, par­tic­u­lar­ly the mam­moth bone flute, which would have been “espe­cial­ly chal­leng­ing to make.” At the time of their dis­cov­ery, researchers spec­u­lat­ed that the flutes “may have been one of the cul­tur­al accom­plish­ments that gave the first Euro­pean mod­ern-human (Homo sapi­ens) set­tlers an advan­tage over their now extinct Nean­derthal-human (Homo nean­derthalis) cousins.” But as with so much of our knowl­edge about Nean­derthals, includ­ing new evi­dence of inter­breed­ing with Homo Sapi­ens, these con­clu­sions may have to be revised.

It is per­haps pos­si­ble that the much-under­es­ti­mat­ed Nean­derthals made their own flutes. Or so a 1995 dis­cov­ery of a flute made from a cave bear femur might sug­gest. Found by arche­ol­o­gist Ivan Turk in a Nean­derthal camp­site at Div­je Babe in north­west­ern Slove­nia, this instru­ment (above) is esti­mat­ed to be over 43,000 years old and per­haps as much as 80,000 years old. Accord­ing to musi­col­o­gist Bob Fink, the flute’s four fin­ger holes match four notes of a dia­ton­ic (Do, Re, Mi…) scale. “Unless we deny it is a flute at all,” Fink argues, the notes of the flute “are inescapably dia­ton­ic and will sound like a near-per­fect fit with­in ANY kind of stan­dard dia­ton­ic scale, mod­ern or antique.” To demon­strate the point, the cura­tor of the Sloven­ian Nation­al Muse­um had a clay repli­ca of the flute made. You can hear it played at the top of the post by Sloven­ian musi­cian Ljuben Dimkaros­ki.

The pre­his­toric instru­ment does indeed pro­duce the whole and half tones of the dia­ton­ic scale, so com­plete­ly, in fact, that Dimkaros­ki is able to play frag­ments of sev­er­al com­po­si­tions by Beethoven, Ver­di, Rav­el, Dvořák, and oth­ers, as well as some free impro­vi­sa­tions “mock­ing ani­mal voic­es.” The video’s Youtube page explains his choice of music as “a pot­pour­ri of frag­ments from com­po­si­tions of var­i­ous authors,” select­ed “to show the capa­bil­i­ties of the instru­ment, tonal range, stac­ca­to, lega­to, glis­san­do….” (Dimkaros­ki claims to have fig­ured out how to play the instru­ment in a dream.) Although arche­ol­o­gists have hot­ly dis­put­ed whether or not the flute is actu­al­ly the work of Nean­derthals, as Turk sug­gest­ed, should it be so, the find­ing would con­tra­dict claims that the close human rel­a­tives “left no firm evi­dence of hav­ing been musi­cal.” But what­ev­er its ori­gin, it seems cer­tain­ly to be a hominid arti­fact—not the work of preda­tors—and a key to unlock­ing the pre­his­to­ry of musi­cal expres­sion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to the Old­est Song in the World: A Sumer­ian Hymn Writ­ten 3,400 Years Ago

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Hear The Epic of Gil­gamesh Read in the Orig­i­nal Akka­di­an and Enjoy the Sounds of Mesopotamia

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness


by | Permalink | Comments (24) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (24)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • Cherei says:

    Haunt­ing­ly beau­ti­ful! Thank you for shar­ing!

  • MKN says:

    res­onates deeply in ones pri­mal soul

  • Cindi says:

    Thanks for this arti­cle! I just find this to be so inter­est­ing! The music was beau­ti­ful!

  • Russ Hartung says:

    Mike,

    I think you meant “First song ever”.

  • Justin says:

    Beau­ti­ful tunes! Awe­some find!
    How­ev­er, not the old­est instru­ment in the world. The tra­di­tion of hand per­cus­sion orig­i­nates from Africa, as did the peo­ple that even­tu­al­ly migrat­ed to Euro­pean and Nordic regions. The like­ly­hood that any musi­cal inven­tion or tra­di­tion pre­ced­ed those orig­i­nat­ed in Africa is nil.

  • gdog galindog says:

    I love the sound but why does the flute have to play Albi­non­i’s Adda­gio Renais­sance style piece writ­ten in the XX cen­tu­ry. Maybe Nean­drthals had music that pre­dict­ed the future.

  • bob says:

    I just read an arti­cle with­in the last few days that says this isn’t an instru­ment. It’s, as the dis­sent­ing archae­ol­o­gist put it, a hye­na “chew toy”. The holes are con­sis­tent with hye­na teeth marks.

    I wish I could remem­ber the pub­li­ca­tion.

    Either way, it cer­tain­ly sounds beau­ti­ful.

  • johnmcracist says:

    there’s no evi­dence of that, drums don’t sur­vive very long, they are made from very per­ish­able mate­ri­als like wood and leather. There’s no clear ori­gin for the drum but the old­est drums ever found were found in india dat­ing to 3200 bce. (when a large influx of hap­logroup r1a appeared from the north­ern steppes of ukraine in a series of migra­tions which became known as the aryan inva­sion)

  • mojoe says:

    They should have Car­los Nakai play it..

  • sara says:

    So agreed.

  • Herb says:

    Is there any­thing humans do not or can NOT ever HATE?

  • M. says:

    My cat is not a fan.

  • Riya S. says:

    Would­n’t it be so neat to actu­al­ly hear it played in 40,000 BCE? I won­der how the songs went. They would prob­a­bly sound strange but rec­og­niz­able.

  • jeff c says:

    We might able to guess at what the music was actu­al­ly like- for exam­ple, what kind of inter­vals are these flutes tuned for, and what musi­cal idioms are found in com­mon world­wide, such as pen­ta­ton­ic scales, or rythms that are sim­i­lar in celtic, African, and Asian music alike, that would have been inher­it­ed from the first music- much as lin­guists have recon­struct­ed “Indo-Euro­pean” lan­guage by con­cen­sus ele­ments of mod­ern lan­guages.

  • Shelley C. says:

    Is there a chance that repli­cates of this flute might be avail­able for pur­chase? If so, I would be inter­est­ed in one.

  • g killian says:

    a prophet who already plays the entire music his­to­ry of the then future in the stone age.

  • natasha says:

    It is relax­ing to imag­ine being in bed in the cave and some friend doing things qui­et­ly and whistle­ing. Felt very qui­et when it sud­den­ly cut off and all the mag­ic left. Made me realise how impor­tant live music is. What goes on around us after the music stops is just as impor­tant as the music. Not applause though. I don’t know who invent­ed applause or when but I hate it. I hate the noise of applause. Scares all the ani­mals and all the beau­ti­ful spir­its and Kil­syth the mag­ic. Some­times it haunt­ed me to hearrange this flute because if I was a bear in would not want holes in my bones. Dis­ease like. .. shud­der. Poor bear!

  • natasha says:

    It is relax­ing to imag­ine being in bed in the cave and some friend doing things qui­et­ly and whistle­ing. Felt very qui­et when it sud­den­ly cut off and all the mag­ic left. Made me realise how impor­tant live music is. What goes on around us after the music stops is just as impor­tant as the music. Not applause though. I don’t know who invent­ed applause or when but I hate it. I hate the noise of applause. Scares all the ani­mals and all the beau­ti­ful spir­its and Kills the mag­ic. Some­times it haunt­ed me to hear this flute because if I was a bear I would not want holes in my bones! Dis­ease like. .. shud­der. Poor bear!

  • Juliet says:

    The arti­cle did say that he used bits of many dif­fer­ent types of music to demon­strate the instru­men­t’s range.

  • Juliet says:

    A hye­na chew toy that just hap­pens to be per­fect for play­ing the dia­ton­ic scale?

    Some peo­ple just don’t want Nean­derthals to be smart.

  • michael c schnelly says:

    Curi­ous how he actu­al­ly plays it. most ‘flutes’ require blow­ing across a trans­verse hole, he seems to be blow­ing into the open end of the bone. Is the end open­ing much small­er, allow­ing for the tim­bre of the sound?

  • John says:

    The first one is the Albi­noni Ada­gio. It is what is always played when Sovi­et peo­ple memo­ri­al­ize the dead of WW II.

  • Ajax Jones says:

    Can we get the Did or STL file of the scan so we can print our own please?

Leave a Reply

Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.