Music Included: 'Oldest musical instrument' found   BBC - June 25, 2009
Germany scientists have published details of flutes dating back to the time
the modern humans began colonizing Europe, 35,000 years ago.

Bone Flute Is Oldest Instrument, Study Says   National Geographic - June 24, 2009
A vulture-bone flute discovered in a European cave is likely
the world's oldest recognizable musical instrument and pushes
back humanity's musical roots, a new study says.

  Music for cavemen -- Audio Version of Flute   MSNBC - June 24, 2009

Stone Age Art Caves May Have Been Concert Halls National Geographic - July 3, 2008 Prehistoric peoples chose places of natural resonant sound to draw their famed cave sketches, according to new analyses of paleolithic caves in France. In at least ten locations, drawings of horses, bison, and mammoths seem to match locations that focus, amplify, and transform the sounds of human voices and musical instruments.

Cave Men Loved to Sing Live Science - July 3, 2008

Ancient hunters painted the sections of their cave dwellings where singing, humming and music sounded best, a new study suggests. Analyzing the famous, ochre-splashed cave walls of France, the most densely painted areas were also those with the best acoustics, the scientists found. Humming into some bends in the wall even produced sounds mimicking the animals painted there. The Upper Paleolithic people responsible for the paintings had likely fine-tuned their hearing to recognize the sound qualities in certain parts of the cave and chose to do their artwork there as a kind of landmark, perhaps as part of a singing ritual, said researcher Iegor Reznikoff, a specialist in ancient music at the University of Paris X in Nanterre. Reznikoff will present his findings at the upcoming Acoustical Society of America meeting in Paris, France.

December 17, 2004 - Nature Magazine

A 30,000-year-old instrument is uncovered in southern Germany. One of the world's oldest known musical instruments has been discovered by German archaeologists. The 18.7-centimetre-long flute, which is carved from mammoth ivory, has three finger holes and would have been capable of playing relatively complex melodies. The flute was found in 31 pieces in the Geienklosterle cave in mountains near Ulm in southern Germany. Two other flutes made of swan bones were discovered at the site more than a decade ago. The three are much older than any other musical instrument yet discovered. They dated the age of the deposits where the three flutes were found to between 30,000 and 37,000 years old.

But it is the extraordinary sophistication of the newly discovered instrument that sets it apart from the swan-bone flutes. "This third flute is like a Rolls Royce compared with a Hyundai," says Conard. Its makers used mammoth ivory, the highest quality material available to them at the time, he says. Carving a flute from solid ivory is much more demanding than making a flute from bird bones, which are already hollow. The crooked mammoth tusk had to be split and the two halves carefully hollowed out, then bound and glued together along a perfectly airtight seam.

he flute's makers lived in the Upper Palaeolithic era of the last ice age, a period when Europe was occupied simultaneously by the last Neanderthals and the first modern humans. The inhabitants of the region were adept artisans, and small ivory figurines, which are among the earliest known examples of figurative art, have been found in several sites. Southern Germany "may have been one of the places where human culture originated", says Conard.

A few fragments of the Stone Age flute are missing, but to investigate what kind of music the instrument would have made, Friedrich Seeberger, an expert in prehistoric music and co-author of this report, has made a replica in elder wood. His early experimentation suggests that the old flute would have allowed a relatively sophisticated level of musical variation. "The tones are quite harmonic," he says.

They don't seem to follow a diatonic scale, he notes, but rather the rules of the pentatonic scale that predominates in Asia. Seeberger now plans to build a more accurate replica, to hear exactly what the original flute would have sounded like. He is currently seeking the right material: mammoth ivory, of course.