Stone Age flutes found in Germany
Prehistoric people made musical instruments out of bone and ivory soon after reaching Europe
By Bruce Bower
The hills may be alive with the sound of music, but so were vulture bones and mammoth tusks for ancient Europeans. Researchers working at two Stone Age German sites have unearthed a nearly complete flute made from a vulture’s forearm as well as sections of three mammoth-ivory flutes.
These 35,000- to 40,000-year-old finds are the oldest known musical instruments in the world, says archaeologist and project director Nicholas Conard of the University of Tübingen in Germany.
Bone flutes previously unearthed at Stone Age sites occupied by humans in France and Austria date to between 19,000 and 30,000 years ago. And many researchers now consider the spaced holes in a controversial 43,000-year-old find, dubbed a Neandertal bone flute in 1995, as the products of chewing by cave bears.