LONDON, (Reuters) – People have been making music for more than 35,000 years, judging by prehistoric bird-bone flutes excavated in southwest Germany.
Researchers said yesterday they had found a five-hole flute made from the radius bone of a griffon vulture and two fragments of ivory flutes in a cave in the Swabian Jura mountains.
The flutes are at least 5,000 years older than any previous confirmed archaeological examples of musical instruments.
“These finds demonstrate the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonised Europe, more than 35,000 calendar years ago,” Nicholas Conard of Tuebingen University and colleagues reported in the journal Nature.
