Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about
The world’s oldest instrument, the 50,000 year old neanderthal flute
It’s carved from the bone of a cave bear – and it sounds hauntingly beautiful.
Archaeologists have found a pre-historic instrument carved from cave bear bones, and it can still be played today. The Neanderthal Flute, found in the cave of Divje Babe in Slovenia, is thought to date back at least 50,000 years, making it the oldest known musical instrument in the world.
It was discovered by archaeologists in a cave near the Idrijca River in 1995. Ivan Turk, who led the excavation, discovered the ‘bone flute’ laid beside a hearth once used by Neanderthals.
While only a fragment remains intact, the ancient instrument can teach us a lot about how Homo sapiens, or our now extinct cousins Homo neanderthalensis, once made music.
Despite dating back thousands of millennia, the instrument does a remarkably good job of playing music that follows our modern use of the musical scale.
In 2015, Musicologist Bob Fink explained that the flute has four finger holes with four different pitches. These pitches match four notes of the traditional scale we use in music today, the diatonic scale. Fink added that the notes of the flute “are inescapably diatonic and will sound like a near-perfect fit within ANY kind of standard diatonic scale, modern or antique.”
This 3D-image of the flute (see below) gives a clearer picture of its origins – a cave bear’s femur bone – and what remains of the instrument today. Long after word of this ancient instrument had spread, a study dismissed the artefact as nothing more than a bone that had been chewed on by hyenas – a view some scientists still share.
And as always have a chilled day from the Viking
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