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35,000-Year-Old Flute Is Oldest Music Instrument Ever Found

Posted by timothy on from the old-earth-theory dept.

Omomyid writes "The AFP is reporting the discovery of a 35,000 year-old flute, made from a vulture wing bone. The context described makes it sound like a musician's shop. There were also fragments of ivory-based flutes and flint tools. Being at least 35KYO this bone flute beats the previous oldest-known musical instrument by at least 5,000 years and puts it very close to the beginning of the Aurignacian culture."

4 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. My ancestors used mammoth bones by WillAffleckUW · · Score: 2, Informative

    But then, we got those when we rode dinosaurs with Jesus.

    Mind you, it was hard lugging around a large mammoth flute.

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    -- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
  2. Neanderthal invented musical instruments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    It is the oldest for the Homo sapiens, but there were flutes found on Neanderthal sites, much older flutes.
    http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/376813/neanderthal_flute_the_oldest_musical.html

  3. Re:This one time by dkleinsc · · Score: 2, Informative

    Come on, this far in and there have been absolutely know "playing the bone flute" jokes?

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    I am officially gone from /. Long live http://www.soylentnews.com/
  4. Re:Interesting! by BlackCreek · · Score: 3, Informative

    There's little reason to believe that our ancestors, going quite far back, had any less inherent intellectual, cultural or social capacity than us. (Other than what we might have from superior nutrition, health, etc. See Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel for that...)

    Jared's "The Third Chimpanzee" goes about how humans branched off and took a separate path from the "other chimps". In it he also goes speculates about how and when we took our great leap forward.

    While Guns Germs and Steel seemed a more insightful book, The Third Chimpanzee goes exactly about the evolutionary differentiation that made us, how different (or not) we are from chimps and other mammals, and about the plausible evolutionary explanations for these differences.