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

My Heavens!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That flute is -29,000 years old!

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!

[tcopeland]

> 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.

G. K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man has some thoughts along the same lines. From this page:

It may be that in certain savage tribes the chief is called the Old Man and nobody is allowed to touch his spear or sit on his seat. It may be that in those cases he is surrounded with superstitious and traditional terrors; and it may be that in those cases, for all I know, he is despotic and tyrannical. But there is not a grain of evidence that primitive government was despotic and tyrannical.

Re:Interesting!

[BlackCreek]

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.

Re:Interesting!

[snl2587]

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 (permalink)...

Re:Interesting!

[SlashDotDotDot]

For what it's worth, the New York Times article about it has an audio clip of a replica being played. I think it sounds surprisingly good.

Friedrich Seeberger, a German specialist in ancient music, reproduced the ivory flute in wood. Experimenting with the replica, he found that the ancient flute produced a range of notes comparable in many ways to modern flutes. "The tones are quite harmonic," he said.

Re:Interesting!

[moon3]

Pity TFA lacks more detail about the tonality. It would be interesting to know what notes it could produce, and what intervals, possibly indicating whether they leaned to minor or major scale for example..

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:Interesting!

[Ripit]

Disclaimer - IAPOM. I am a professional orchestral musician.

"Harmonics" doesn't really mean anything in this sense. Flutes don't play two notes simultaneously, so there is no harmony. This flute is capable of playing at least 5 distinct pitches, or at least 10 if you count overblowing to get a higher octave. The notes in the example are Eb, F, G, Bb, and C, which is a pentatonic scale.

This is the most amazing thing to me. The pentatonic scale's pitches have the simple frequency ratios of 1:9/8:5/4:3/2:5/3. Instruments designed to play this scale have been found almost everywhere humans play music. The person that made this instrument perceived, through sound, these simple mathematical ratios. 35,000 years ago, humans had already discovered the beauty in mathematics.

Also, I can draw the conclusion that the person that made this flute had made flutes previously, or learned from someone who did. The chances of gouging holes in a bone at random and having a very accurate pentatonic scale along with a serviceable embouchure hole in the end product is vanishingly small. This skill is learned by trial and error or instruction. This opens up more questions. If the maker of this flute didn't invent the pentatonic scale, who did? How old is the scale?

Re:Interesting!

[Ripit]

I'm a tenured professional orchestra musician. I'll try to explain.

NotBornYesterday's conclusion was dead on! The AC is also correct.

In the example, the ancient flute played the pitches Eb, F, G, Bb, and C, which is a simple pentatonic scale. When in this particular order, it's called a major pentatonic scale. It's incidental that the pitches are close to these modern pitches (AC's point). The important thing is the distance from one pitch to the next, or in other words, the ratio of one pitch to another (NBY's point).

The ratios in the pentatonic scale are 1:9/8:5/4:3/2:5/3. So if you set Eb as 1, F is 9/8 of Eb, G is 5/4 of Eb, Bb is 3/2 of Eb, and C is 5/3 of Eb. The ratios are what is important. The absolute value of the pitch in Hertz is incidental. The maker of this flute understood these ratios, and constructed the flute accordingly.

The fact that people were using the pentatonic scale 35,000 years ago or more is stunning.

This one time

[Anonymous Coward]

This one time, 35,000 years ago at band camp...

Re:This one time

[Albert Sandberg]

... no stairway. denied.

Re:This one time

[dkleinsc]

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

I doubt it's the oldest

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet people have been playing the skin flute for far longer

My ancestors used mammoth bones

[WillAffleckUW]

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

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

Oblig YEC reesponse

[MaXintosh]

Obviously, the flute was burried by the flood. Because like dinosaurs, flutes were put there by the devil to fool us. Thus the phrase "devil music."

Re:Oblig YEC reesponse

[rubycodez]

agreed. and if you listen to the 35,000 year old flute music backwards, you can hear satanic incantations hidden by "backwards boneflute masking"

Re:Oblig YEC reesponse

[Dunbal]

And if you filmed the discovery of this flute and play it backwards, you see a team of scientist burying a flute for 35,000 years only to have it discovered by some primitive human, who then picks it up and starts playing it....

Neanderthal invented musical instruments

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.?

Re:Neanderthal invented musical instruments

[u38cg]

And I hate to be a tedious [citation needed] asshat, but I do wonder if there's any chance of a better cite than a three paragraph article on a self-publishing website?

Re:Neanderthal invented musical instruments

[the phantom]

Actually most studies have shown that hunter-gatherer societies have a lot more leisure time than industrial or agrarian societies. On average, they might spend 2-4 hours per day procuring food, compared to 12 or more hours per day in an agrarian society, or 6-10 in an industrial society. Instead, there are a couple things that one should consider. First, look at the line plotted by an exponential curve. It starts very flat, then rises very quickly. Assuming that "progress" (however you measure it) is an exponential phenomenon, it would make sense that things would appear to be progressing faster now than 100 years ago, and that things 100 years ago would be progressing faster than things 1000 years ago, and so on.

Secondly, consider the size of group sustainable by hunting and gathering. You simply cannot sustain the same population density hunting and gathering that you can with agriculture. Generally speaking, hunter-gatherers are quite mobile. Here, in the Great Basin, there might have been as few as 10 people per 100 square miles. In other parts of the world, where resources are more plentiful, densities might have been higher, but still not to the level of an agrarian society. Without high population densities, you are going to have less communication, and fewer people to collaborate on large projects.

Furthermore, and here is the kicker, everyone in a hunter-gatherer level society needs to be a generalist. All of the men hunt. All of the women gather. The children help where they can. Each person is basically the same as another. Once horticulture and agriculture begin to develop, people are able to settle down more (thus, food stores can be laid in more easily), higher population densities can be maintained, and individuals can start working on something other pure subsistance activities. It is craft specialization that allows technology to progress.

Complex vs Simple.

[B5_geek]

I understand that this could be considered definitive proof of an 'instrument', but surely they don't discount that beating two sticks together can be considered as being musical either.

Consider this: prehistoric man had to be MORE intelligent to survive then modern man. If all electrical devices stop working tomorrow, a significant % of the population will be dead within 4 weeks.

Re:Complex vs Simple.

[pluther]

That doesn't point to a difference in intelligence, just a different set of needed skills.

Cave Geeks?

[filesiteguy]

So, does this mean that the term "band geek" was discovered 35,000 years ago?

I wonder if they wore underwear so that Ogg could give the owner of this flute a wedgie.

Needs some inner light ...

[xleeko]

Psssft. Get back to me when the grad student who dug it out collapses into a coma and lives a lifetime as a paleolithic hunter, then wakes up and can play some good mammoth hunting songs ...

Re:Flute

[sexconker]

Fail.
Pelvis was obliterated due to snu-snu.

I'd like some hot chicks (and other flute jokes)

[geekoid]

to date my bone flute.
*giggity*

How did they know it was a flute? There were carvings on the wall from people whining they could ahve done it better/

How did they get two flutes in tune? they bashed the skull in of one of the bone flautists.

Why did the neanderthal go extinct? to get away from the flute recital.

How many bone Flautists did it taker to start a fire? 2 one to do it and another to push them into the fire.

What do you call a flute that's been buried for 35000 years? A good start.

2 flutists ride a mammoth over a cliff, what's the tragedy? you can fit 4 flutists on a mammoth.

I can go on, but unlike a flautists I know when to stop.

Minor correction

[geekoid]

"...who then picks it up and starts playing it....badly"