People // Vijith A. // Blog

In a dark cave in southwest Germany, Tubingen University archaeologist Nicholas Conard has discovered what are now being called the oldest musical instruments in the world, a pair of flutes made from vulture bones and mammoth tusks that date back 35,000 years to the last ice age.

Conard has since expressed surprise at the revelation that the prehistoric humans who made the instruments would do so using mammoth tusks, which are harder to work with and not already hollow like the bird bones, and also that they had enough leisure time for music in the first place what with all the hunting, gathering, and Smilodon-dodging.

Indiana Jonesing aside, though, it's also interesting to consider what this means for musical history. Or, prehistory, rather, since the oldest sheet music in the world was discovered in Syria in the 50's. Any well-schooled improviser can prove that sophisticated music can exist without notation, recordings or any other fixed medium. In the absence of instruments, how far back could it go? Can chanting and tree-stump drumming alone can account for the preceding epoch?