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

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."

Comments

Interesting!

[squiggly12]

It makes a person wonder just how long ago music was enjoyed (besides whistling or singing) or did we just grunt our way around?

Re:Interesting!

[causality]

It makes a person wonder just how long ago music was enjoyed (besides whistling or singing) or did we just grunt our way around?

The more I learn about the subject, the more convinced I am that the ancients were not the unsophisticated primitives that we often imagine them to be.

Re:Interesting!

[Anonymous Coward]

Or that we are not the sophisticated advanced species we often imagine us to be?

Re:Interesting!

[NotBornYesterday]

I think you miss the point. The old flute sounds close to modern flutes. When you consider the broad range of instruments and musical scales (think "non-western") in the world, having prehistoric and modern instruments whose notes are "quite harmonic" falls somewhere between interesting and amazing.

When you say "... most people find pleasant...", you are right on the edge of a rather profound idea. The laws of physics haven't changed, but people certainly have. Does this mean that what they found pleasant and what we find pleasant are similar? Does that mean that musical perception is largely unchanged in the last 35 millenia?

Re:Interesting!

[apoc.famine]

For awhile now I've been wondering about the connection between music and religion. For several thousand years, the most common place to hear a serious musical performance was at a religious ceremony. (Unless you were nobility)
 
A pipe organ in a cathedral is a staggeringly amazing experience even for those of us able to find and listen to recordings ahead of time. Imagine the reaction of the poor common folk who had nothing but a reed flute and some singing in a grass hut to prepare them for it.
 
As much as video killed the radio star, I wonder how much recorded music killed religion. (See the Taliban, who ban it, for instance.)

Re:Interesting!

[bcrowell]

But what's really interesting about this flute is that the harmonics are very close to a modern-day flute - 35,000 years later! There is a sample of the recreated sound right now on the New York Times website

Thanks for the cool link :-) You're misusing the terminology a little -- the original NYT article is more correct.

Every sound can be broken down into a sum of sine waves. Usually, for basic physical reasons, those sine waves have frequencies that are all integer multiples (or nearly integer multiples) of the fundamental frequency. When they have this integer-multiple relationship, they're called "harmonics;" the more general term for the case where they're not integer multiples (anharmonic) is "partials." Any wind instrument that's made out of an air column is going to have integer-multiple harmonics, not anharmonic partials. So when you say that the harmonics are close to a modern flute, that's not really a useful statement; trivially, for physical reasons, any tone played on any wind instrument is going to have the same harmonics as the same note played on any other wind instrument. The only thing that will be different is the strengths of the harmonics.

What the expert quoted in the NYT article says is "The tones are quite harmonic." This is a different statement. It means that if you had two flutes like this one, and you played combinations of notes, they would sound good together. This has to do with how the scale is constructed. He also doesn't say the scale is the same as any particular modern one, just that it's a scale that sounds good in relation to itself.

The only cross-cultural universal we see today is that all cultures have what's called octave identification, meaning that, e.g., middle C and the C an octave above it are perceived as being similar, and able to play the same musical function. Most cultures don't have harmony at all -- that's mainly a function of Western music. Different cultures generally don't use the same scales. E.g., Beethoven, a Javanese gamelan orchestra, and a Delta blues musician use different scales in different ways. It wouldn't even make sense to interpret the expert's quote as saying that the scale is the same as today's scale, there's more than one scale used today.

Unfortunately I couldn't get the sound widget to play in my browser.

Re:Neanderthal invented musical instruments

[dgatwood]

Mod parent up. Assuming that the linked article is correct, this recent find is at least 8,000 years newer than the oldest known flute, and possibly as much as 47,000 years newer. Of course, this may be the oldest definitively dated flute.

What is fascinating about this is that it gives you just how far back primitive man was creating complex artistic works. I'm sure there are other instruments of similar vintage---drums and the like---though they may not have survived the years since. The funny part will be when scientists discover that they've underestimated the age of the xylophone family by the better part of a million years. :-) I mean really, if something requiring as much carving as a flute goes back 80,000 years, how absurd is it to believe that something as simple as a bunch of sticks cut to different lengths only goes back to 2,000 B.C.?