World's Oldest Musical Instruments Found

Researchers in an area of Germany famous for its fossil finds have discovered flutes dating to 35,000 B.C., making them the world's oldest known musical instruments.

In keeping with the spirit of the summer's numerous "fossil" tours, including ones from ZZ Top, Judas Priest and The Sonics, scientists have just unveiled the world's oldest musical instruments. The pair of flutes was discovered in the Hohle Fels cavern in southwest Germany. The pair date back to the time modern humans began colonising Europe, 35,000 years ago, making them the oldest musical instruments yet found. The researchers noted that music was widespread in pre-historic times and may have been one of a number of factors which helped give them an edge over the Neanderthals. The most well-preserved of the flutes is made from a vulture's wing bone, measuring 20 centimeters long with five finger holes and two "V"-shaped notches on one end of the instrument into which the researchers assume the player blew. It's easy to speculate it may have been owned by the world's first death rock band, vultures not being known for their honeyed song. The site also yielded fragments of two other flutes carved from ivory that they believe was taken from the tusks of mammoths. Presumably, their owners were the first hippie jam band. The eight flutes found were equally divided four each between those of bird bones and those of mammoth tusk, suggesting the concert at the cavern was a double-headliner affair. The researchers at Tubingen University suggests that the playing of music was common as far back as 40,000 years ago when modern humans spread across Europe and was used for religious as well as recreational occasions. Further, musical instruments are a signposts to a creative culture, which opens the exciting possibility that human creativity may have been further along the road than previously thought. That is a view supported by Professor Chris Stringer, a human origins researcher at the Natural History Museum in London. "It's becoming increasingly clear that music was part of day-to-day life," he said. "The modern humans that came into our area already had a whole range of symbolic artifacts, figurative art, depictions of mythological creatures, many kinds of personal ornaments and also a well-developed musical tradition," This allows for the argument that the emergence of art and culture so early might explain why early modern humans survived and Neanderthals, with whom they co-existed at the time, became extinct. "Music could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks, and thereby perhaps have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans relative to a culturally more conservative and demographically more isolated Neanderthal populations. "These flutes provide yet more evidence of the sophistication of the people that lived at that time and the probable behavioural and cognitive gulf between them and Neanderthals," concluded Skinner, with a riff worthy of Ozzy. The flutes are expected to go on tour in 2010 but no dates have been set.