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filthy
SFN Die Hard
USA
14408 Posts |
 Posted - 06/27/2009 : 07:03:48
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Link
 A 35,000-year-old flute made of vulture bone found in a cave in southwestern Germany is the world's oldest known musical instrument. The artifact suggests music may have been one advantage our ancestors had over their cousins, the now-extinct Neanderthals, according to a report published in the journal Nature.
The five-holed flute, which is fully intact and made from a griffon vulture's radius bone, was discovered with fragments of other flutes crafted out of mammoth ivory. The bird-bone instrument was found in a region in which similar instruments have popped up lately, says lead author Nicholas Conard, but this flute is “by far the most complete of the musical instruments so far recovered from the caves.” … Until now the artifacts appeared to be too rare and not as precisely dated to support wider interpretations of the early rise of music [The New York Times]. To make sure the newly discovered instruments were dated correctly, samples were tested independently and using different methods at facilities in England and Germany. Both found the bone to be at least 35,000 years old, during the Modern Paleolithic era.
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I would think that the first instruments would have been percussion, but this is certainly an excellent find.
Heh, the prettiest girls in the orchestra tend to be flautists
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"What luck for rulers that men do not think." -- Adolf Hitler (1889 - 1945)
"If only we could impeach on the basis of criminal stupidity, 90% of the Rethuglicans and half of the Democrats would be thrown out of office." ~~ P.Z. Myres
"The default position of human nature is to punch the other guy in the face and take his stuff." ~~ Dude
Brother Boot Knife of Warm Humanitarianism,
and Crypto-Communist! 
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Simon
SFN Regular
USA
1992 Posts |
Posted - 06/27/2009 : 08:08:32 [Permalink]
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| Percussion might not have seem to necessitate its own instruments. After all, sticks and stones would work just as well... but not leave any recognizable artefacts. |
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan - 1996 |
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Kil
Evil Skeptic
USA
13477 Posts |
 Posted - 06/27/2009 : 09:07:57 [Permalink]
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filthy:
I would think that the first instruments would have been percussion... |
Close.
The invention of music. Documented and filmed!
As you can see, it was a very primitive jug, a part of the rhythm section which also includes percussion instruments. |
Uncertainty may make you uncomfortable. Certainty makes you ridiculous.
Why not question something for a change?
Genetic Literacy Project |
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The oldest musical instrument -- thus far....
