Ancient Music

January 8, 2025 4:39 AM

Hear the world’s oldest instrument, the 50,000 year old neanderthal flute

Found in Slovenia in 1995, this broken flute was made of a cave bear femur. 2 holes were fully still there, and enough of 3 others were present to allow a playable replica to be made that produces notes that fit in the diatonic scale of modern Western music. The recording in the article is Ljuben Dimkaroski, Slovenian archaeologist and trumpeter, playing an assortment of Western music on the flute, and the accompanying video has cool details about the understood history of the instrument. However, another study dismisses the hollow bone with holes in it as the work of hyenas.

Neanderthal art previously on Metafilter

posted by hydropsyche (13 comments total)

Hyenas make flutes? That’s even more amazing!
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:47 AM on January 8 [21 favorites]

Hearing this is amazing. Hard to imagine what life and music would have been like as much as 20,000 years before the domestication of dogs even started. I'm glad they choose to present this way.
posted by meinvt at 5:32 AM on January 8 [3 favorites]

Seriously, it’s fantastic (and the idea of hyenas making holes like that seems unlikely to me, but I’m not a paleontologist, so what do I know?). I was a bit taken aback by the video claiming that this was the oldest melody in the world, however. Did the Neanderthal leave a score, too?
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:46 AM on January 8 [2 favorites]

I’ve heard of preferring a musician’s earlier work, but this is ridiculous.
posted by Lemkin at 6:16 AM on January 8 [9 favorites]

I'm skeptical of the claim, and implications, that it was to produce a scale like a modern diatonic scale. The reason is at the time when I first heard the story, I was experimenting with fipple, end blown, and side blown flutes, and found it surprisingly easy for an arbitrary hole pattern to come really close to what we would call recognizable intervals. There's not much to indicate how it was actually played, end blown, side blown, even as a vessel ocarina type flute. In which case, tuning could be impossible to divine without a complete undamaged instrument to evaluate. Simple variations in hole size and placement throws the speculation up in the air

As far as being the work of hyenas, I suppose it's possible, and still wouldn't exclude the possibility that it was also used as a musical instrument. People to this day use found objects to make music all the time.
posted by 2N2222 at 7:01 AM on January 8 [9 favorites]

As a former orchestra kid, I am not surprised that hyenas were in the band.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:19 AM on January 8 [13 favorites]

Diedrich (the dismissive study's author) reportedly argued that not only this flute but all similar prehistoric flutes are the remnants of hyena meals, which sounded unlikely to me at first. If his hypothesis is right, then surely there should be plenty of hyena-made bone flutes lying around in the modern day—people must be just picking them up from the ground in Africa... and how about zoos? They must end up with dozens of them, after their hyenas carefully leave behind the neatly punctured bones from their meal and... oh.

But you know what, his paper is compelling (and pretty straightforward to follow—skip to the conclusion for the essence of his argument). It seems that the idea that these are human-made is a product of selective wishful thinking. Lots of skulls and other remains with neatly punctured round holes in them have been found, not just these flute-shaped bones. Also, human-made drill holes have different features from puncture holes, features that don't match these finds.

That doesn't necessarily mean that some of these couldn't have been used as bone flutes by humans—after all, few flautists today make their own instruments—although Diedrich's dating evidence suggests that's unlikely too.

I love the idea of Neanderthals making musical instruments as much as anyone, but his research and conclusions look strong to me.
posted by rory at 8:57 AM on January 8 [6 favorites]

That doesn't necessarily mean that some of these couldn't have been used as bone flutes by humans—after all, few flautists today make their own instruments—although Diedrich's dating evidence suggests that's unlikely too.

Or maybe the hyena-made flutes gave them the idea to make their own.

"You know, Bob, I'd really like to expand the band, but the hyenas just haven't been around as much lately, what to do?"

[Bob picks up an unusually skinny piece of flint] "Well, Ted, I just had the wackiest idea..."
posted by Halloween Jack at 9:27 AM on January 8 [1 favorite]

Thanks for that link Rory. I don’t know if my phone is failing at something, but I was getting frustrated with reading claims the flute has two holes and three damaged ones and only seeing an image showing two holes and maybe a damaged third one.

I’m also struck more by the claim in that paper’s conclusion that the alleged flutes were not found in neanderthal associated strata.
posted by house-goblin at 9:34 AM on January 8 [2 favorites]

Interested in whatever else is in your music playlist, Hydropsyche. Very into that sound!
posted by amtho at 10:07 AM on January 8

Thanks to those who found more context! I stumbled on this after seeing an obviously not right meme on Facebook that claimed to show the whole 20,000 year old flute, intact and playable, which I figured was impossible. So I googled to find out if any of the story was real and found the ClassicalFM story and video. Sorry to learn that there is more evidence that it might not be real because I really love the idea that our sister species also made music that might have been something like ours. Like at night Homo neandertalensis and Homo sapiens sat in neighboring caves listening to each other play.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:55 PM on January 8 [2 favorites]

I don't have a bone to pick with this research, nor do I have a dog in this fight, ahem, but of my favorite instances of the Gettier problem is in the wikipedia article - according to the original discoverer (and defender of the "it's a flute" hypothesis):

"Though he argues for Neanderthal origin of the artifact, Turk presumed that the V-fracture at the proximal end is a typical carnivore damage that occurred after the flute was no longer in use."

So it was made by a hyena, but only after it was already a flute!
posted by Baby_Balrog at 7:45 PM on January 8 [1 favorite]

That was super cool.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 3:50 PM on January 10