Saturday, August 15, 2009

Stone Age Rock and Roll

No one knows when prehistoric people started making and using complex musical instruments. The August 6, 2009 issue of Nature reports the discovery of bone and ivory flutes dating from 35,000 years ago. The flutes were found in caves in southwestern Germany.

The bone flute (picture) was made from the radius of a griffon vulture. Bird bones are hollow, which makes them ideal for flute construction. The flute had five finger holes, and was marked with fine evenly-placed scratches near the finger holes. The scratches may have been used to measure the location of the holes for tone calibration. Anthropologists believe the two V-shaped notches in one end of the flute served as a mouthpiece.

Fragments of two ivory flutes were also unearthed. An ivory flute was more difficult to make than a bone flute. First the mammoth tusk was shaped to the rough form of a flute. Next, the tusk was split longitudinally so the inside could be hollowed out. Finger holes were drilled, and the two halves were cemented together with air-tight seals.

It's hard to guess what the earliest music sounded like, but it probably wasn't like this.

Conard, N.J., Malina, M. and Munzel, S.C., New Flutes Document the Earliest Musical Tradition in Southwestern Germany, Nature, 460:737-740 (2009).

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