Christian Science Monitor: World’s oldest instrument found. And boy, could those cavemen rock.
The instrument is a 35,000-year-old bone flute unearthed by a team led by Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist at the University of Tubingen, in Germany.
The flute, which was discovered in the same area as the Venus of Hohle Fels, was apparently made from the hollowed-out bones of a vulture. Writing in the latest issue of Nature magazine, Conard and his colleagues, Maria Malina of the Heidelberg Academy of Science and Susanne Munzel of the University of Tubingen, said the find demonstrated “the presence of a well-established musical tradition at the time when modern humans colonized Europe.”
Conard’s team excavated the flute in September 2008, the same month they recovered six ivory fragments from the Hohle Fels cave that form a female figurine they believe is the oldest known sculpture of the human form.
After all the dust had settled, the scientists found small pieces of four flutes – the vulture bone number pictured above, however, is the only complete instrument. Speaking to Alan Boyle at MSNBC, Conard said the find suggests that “modern humans seemed to have had much larger social networks,” than previously imagined.
-759725.jpg){kind=link}
4 comments:
Normally, I don't care as much about Archaeological finds (Hey, why do you think my blog is PaleoQuest and not "ArchaeoQuest" ir something, lol), but that is truly an interesting find.
Hello young Mr. Lewis. Welcome back. I read your post about cryptozoology and had a mixed reaction. While I agree that many creatures believed to exist by cryptozoologists are not real, as a lover of dinosaurs you must know that there are many even more fantastic creatures that did in fact exist in the past that no longer exist today because they are extinct. What do you think about giants?
I've been thinking about population growth. The orthodoxy has it that it's an ever increasing number of humans, and in the ancient past there were few, until the 1800s when it started to take off.
But do we really know this? I mean, we see in Africa and China that prior to the "Green Revolution" it was possible to host millions of people. Could there have been billions alive during the Medieval Warming?
Or in the ancient past during the time when these civilizations were building monoliths and wells...and flutes?
John,
One of the arguments the atheists use to deny the historical Exodus of the Hebrews from Egypt is that, "Two million people would leave behind lots of garbage (especially after wandering the country side for a number of years). We have no evidence of this garbage."
LOL.
Post a Comment