35,000 Years Ago… We Started Rocking

The oldest musical instrument ever identified has been found in Germany’s Ach Valley.  It’s a 5-hole flute carved from a giant vulture’s wing-bone, and it was made by the Aurignacian people, who flourished from 40,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago.  This flute has been carbon-dated back 35,000 years, making it the oldest instrument ever found by about 5,000 years.

Sure, in the Present Day, everone likes to kick a little Jethro Tull in moderation, but the flute was perhaps much more important Back When: it may be the reason we beat out those @sshole Neanderthals…  

But it may have given them a slight edge over neighbouring Neanderthals, who died out even as Homo sapiens sapiens flourished.

“Upper Palaeolithic music could have contributed to the maintenance of large social networks, and thereby have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans” compared to the more “culturally conservative” and isolated Neanderthals, he said.

Scientists have long speculated that Neanderthals played music too, but no evidence of their musicality has been found so far.

Yeah, they played sh*tty music, and they died out because all their fans stopped listening to them.  They were irrelevant, you know?  I mean, they were opening for Sugar Ray.

Homo sapiens, on the other hand, survived because we went electric, even though our fans intially booed us and called us Judas.  Critics retrospectively consider this one of the most defining moments of our career.

The flute is 8.7 inches long, 1 inch in diameter, and probably sounds like a today flute.  (Researchers claim that they cannot know for sure because a replica has not been made yet, but come on… somebody tried that thing out when no one was looking.)  Also found at the same dig site:

And a stunning female figurine from the same period found only a couple paces from the bone flute, reported last month, points to a broader artistic flowering.

Yep: the first groupie.  Experts believe that Stone Age music sounded something like this.

Source: AFP via Gizmodo.