The Oldest Musical Instruments Ever Found

In 2008, excavating in Hohle Fels cave in the Swabian Jura of southwest Germany, Nicholas Conard’s team found twelve fragments of hollow bone. Reassembled, they formed a slender flute about 22 centimetres long, made from the wing bone of a griffon vulture, with five finger holes and a V-shaped notch cut at one end to blow across.

It was found just metres from the Venus of Hohle Fels, one of the oldest carved human figures, in layers at least 35,000 years old. Here, at the very start of the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe, people were already making both figurative art and music.

The Swabian Jura flutes

Hohle Fels is not alone. Nearby caves in the Ach and Lone valleys — Geissenklösterle, Vogelherd and Hohle Fels — have produced at least eight flutes or fragments. Radiocarbon dates published by Thomas Higham and colleagues in 2012 place the oldest, from Geissenklösterle, at around 43,000–42,000 years ago, among the earliest traces of Homo sapiens in Europe.

Most were made from hollow bird wing bones, which are naturally tube-shaped. But one Geissenklösterle flute was carved from mammoth ivory, a far harder job: the maker had to split a section of solid tusk lengthwise, hollow out both halves, and fit them back together with an airtight seal. Nobody puts that much effort into a toy.

Replicas of the Hohle Fels flute produce a range of clear notes. We cannot know what melodies were played, but the finger holes show the makers were controlling pitch deliberately.

The Neanderthal flute controversy

In 1995 Ivan Turk excavated a thigh bone of a young cave bear at Divje Babe I cave in Slovenia, in a layer with Neanderthal stone tools and dated to roughly 60,000–50,000 years ago. It had two complete round holes and traces of two more at the broken ends. Turk argued it was a flute — the first Neanderthal musical instrument.

Critics, notably Francesco d’Errico and Cajus Diedrich, pointed out that cave bear bones in the same cave are riddled with bite marks, and that carnivores, especially hyenas and wolves, produce round punctures when they chew bones. The holes lacked clear tool marks, and the bone’s ends had been gnawed. Most specialists now regard the Divje Babe object as a chewed bone. Turk’s team continues to defend it, and a Slovenian musician has played replicas on stage.

The absence of a convincing Neanderthal instrument proves little. Neanderthals had the anatomy for complex vocalisation (see could other human species talk?), and singing, rhythm and drumming on wood or skin would leave no trace at all.

An Ice Age horn that still sounds

In 1931 a large Charonia seashell was found at the entrance of Marsoulas cave in the French Pyrenees, a site famous for its red painted animals. It sat in a museum in Toulouse for decades, assumed to be a drinking cup.

In 2021 Carole Fritz, Gilles Tosello and colleagues re-examined it. The tip had been deliberately broken off to make a mouthpiece, the lip trimmed, and traces of resin and red pigment suggested a mouthpiece had once been attached and the shell painted with dots in the same style as the cave walls. A professional horn player blew into it and produced three clear notes, close to C, C-sharp and D. After about 18,000 years, it still works.

Instruments that imitate birds

At Eynan (Ain Mallaha) in northern Israel, Laurent Davin and colleagues identified in 2023 seven small perforated bird bones from the Natufian culture, about 12,000 years old. Blown, they produce high whistles that closely match the calls of raptors such as sparrowhawks and kestrels — possibly used to attract birds, communicate or make music, or all three.

At Jiahu in Henan province, China, archaeologists have recovered over 30 flutes made from the wing bones of red-crowned cranes, about 9,000 years old. Some have seven finger holes, and when one was played in 1999 it could produce a recognisable scale.

Were caves chosen for their sound?

A more speculative line of research asks whether painted caves were chosen for their acoustics. Iegor Reznikoff and others have reported that paintings in some French caves cluster at spots with strong echoes or resonance. The idea is attractive — Ice Age ceremonies with singing in resonant chambers — but hard to test rigorously, since many cave spots resonate and paintings are placed for many reasons. (See Lascaux vs Chauvet for the art itself.)

Why ancient music matters

An instrument is evidence of a lot more than music. It shows planning, specialised craft, an understanding of how hole spacing changes pitch, and a social setting in which performance mattered. The Swabian flutes appear alongside the earliest figurative sculpture and personal ornaments in Europe, part of a package of symbolic behaviour that some researchers think helped hold far-flung groups together.

The music itself is gone. But the fact that people 40,000 years ago spent hours hollowing out ivory to make a better sound says something deeply familiar about them.