World's Oldest Flute

The flute at right was assembled from 31 pieces found in the Geissenklösterle cave in Southwest Germany, near the Danube. It's the oldest human-made instrument unearthed so far, and dates back to around 35,000 BCE. It was found in 2005, and is less than 7 inches long.

In the same cave, archaeologists found beautiful small animal carvings equallly old, that are as lovely and artistic as pieces made within the past few thousand years. Some are described and photographed in the Sept-Oct issue of Archaeology Magazine.

A 2005 article from Japan Times has more information, though it's focused on another flute, found in the same cave and dated to the same period, roughly 30,000 to 37,000 BCE. The second flute is made of a Whooping Swan's wing bone. Bird bones are hollow, so making a flute from them was much easier. Imagine the maker of the first flute, carving and hollowing out a sliver of mammoth's tusk!

To hear what the swan's wing flute sounded like, click on this link. You'll hear part of a recording made by an archaeologist, Friedrich Seeberger. He reproduced the 3-holed flute using the wing bone of a Mute Swan. The reproduction is a little larger than the original: 150 mm v. 126 mm. It produces seven notes--four base, three treble.

According to Mark Brazil, the author of the Japan Times article, Seeberger actually recorded a CD called Klangwelten der Altsteinzeit (Sound World of the Old Stone Age), but I could not find it on Amazon.

Another claimant exists for the position of World's Oldest Flute, and it could be 10,000 years older than the mammoth tusk flute: the Divje flute.

The Divje flute, found in cave at Divje, Slovenia in 1995, is a broken piece of a cave bear's thigh bone. Two lined-up holes exist, but signs of other holes at the broken ends of the bone are less clear. Archaeologists don't agree that these holes were made deliberately by humans (or Neanderthals). The holes, some say, could have been made by a creature biting down on the bone. Read more about the Divje flute here.

A last digression: dating. Not as in "Let's have dinner," but as in B.C. & A.D., BCE & CE, and my least favorite: B.P.

B.C. means Before Christ, and is accepted as counting backwards from the year 1 B.C. (there is no year 0) A.D. means "anno domini" and covers the time since the year 1 A.D.

BCE and CE mean "Before Current Ea" and "Current Era." They correspond to B.C. and A.D. IOW, they count from the year 1.

B.P.: Before Present is tricksy. Some scientists say it really stands for Bad Policy and should be dumped. B.P. means before 1950. So if someting is 3,000 B.P., it occured in 1050 B.C. or 1050 BCE.

An incredibly stupid way of numbering, and proof that scientists are just bad at dating anything.