In southern, Germany archaeological researchers have discovered the oldest man-made musical instrument in the world – made from a 40,000 years old wing bone.

Once you have entered the cave you find yourself in a vast cavern in the middle of a mountain of some 6,000 cubic metres in volume. 35,000 years ago, this place must have been just as impressive to the artist who created artefacts resembling horses, water birds and other small items in the Arch valley of southern Germany. Judging by the sound of the instrument, the Stone Age people may also have been inspired by the acoustics of this voluminous space.

In this place archaeological researchers have found the oldest known handcrafted flutes. The cavern is well known to researchers as an important site for sign of early human efforts; recently members of the same team found the world oldest Venus figure.

The best preserved of the flutes was reconstructed from 12 pieces that were found scattered across a small oval plot inside the Hohle Fels cave, close to Schelklingen village, near Stuttgart. The instrument was made from a griffon vulture’s wing bone, 21.8 cm long and 0.8 cm in diameter. It has several markings next to the four of five finger holes. These are carved with precision, probably with a firestone tool. They are marked by two V-shaped notches at the end of the instrument (i.e. where it was played). The bird must have had a wing size of more than 2.5 metres. Its skeleton would have offered a substantial source of material for musical instrument builders.

The flute has been C 14 radiocarbon dated around 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. This is a reliable technique, developed by Willard Libby and his colleagues in 1949.

Today, the instrument itself is too fragile to be played, but a working replica has been made, and recordings made of tunes such as The Star Spangled Banner.

“Music could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks, and thereby perhaps have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans relative to a culturally more conservative and demographically more isolated Neanderthal populations” the researcher wrote.

The other three flutes are made out of ivory of a mammoth tusk. First they have carved the outer shape; later they have split the ‘raw flute’ into two parts, hollowed them out and glued them back together with birch pitch and bound with some plant fiber or animal tendon. This was definitely not a work of an apprentice flute maker.

Prof. Dr. Nicholas Conard head of the research team from the Tubingen University says: “That’s really quite a surprise that flutes would be made out of massive mammoth ivory, which is material that’s very hard to work, and not just bird bones, which are hollow and ideal for making flutes. We can now conclude that music played an important role in Aurignacian life in the Ach and Lone valleys. It’s becoming increasingly clear that music was part of day-to-day life,” His findings were published by the online journal Nature June 2009. Although the heavily built cave inhabitants ate meat of birds, reindeer, horses and gnawed bones, they could have not been that coarse as they were able to create jewelry and abstract figures with their sharp stone tools.

Benjamin Ochse lives and works in Berlin as Design Manager, Curator and Author. Past projects include writing and researching Taonga Puoro (traditional musical instruments of the Maori people) collected by James Cook and his crew on his three voyages to New Zealand.