ART

The Oldest Instruments

~42,000 years ago

Palaeolithic · Upper Palaeolithic · Last glacial

From the caves of the Swabian Jura, in Germany, come flutes of vulture wing bone and of mammoth ivory, made about 42,000 years ago: the oldest known musical instruments. The bird-bone flutes exploit a naturally hollow tube; the ivory ones were split, hollowed, and rejoined airtight, a far harder craft. The same caves held some of the earliest figurative sculptures.

Why it matters

Music leaves almost no trace: of everything sung, drummed and danced across deep time, only an instrument durable enough survives to testify. A five-holed flute implies scales, learned fingerings, listeners; whoever carved a playable tube from solid ivory was reproducing an instrument type, not improvising one. Music was already old and organized when these were dropped by the hearth.

Dating & uncertainty

The flutes come from early Aurignacian layers of the Swabian caves; ultrafiltered radiocarbon places the start of these layers around 42,500 years. Dating this period sits at the edge of the radiocarbon method, and the same layers once yielded much younger, contamination-affected ages: the chronology is only as good as the chemistry.

Sources

1. Conard, Malina & Münzel (2009), Nature · New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germanydoi:10.1038/nature08169
2. Higham et al. (2012), Journal of Human Evolution · Testing models for the beginnings of the Aurignacian and the advent of figurative art and music: the radiocarbon chronology of Geissenklösterledoi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2012.03.003
3. Conard & Bolus (2003), Journal of Human Evolution · Radiocarbon dating the appearance of modern humans and timing of cultural innovations in Europe: new results and new challengesdoi:10.1016/s0047-2484(02)00202-6

Our species’ history as one day

20:48:003 h 12 min before midnight

if the 315,000 years of Homo sapiens were compressed into a single day