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Archaeology

The earliest musical tradition

Nature volume 460, pages 695–696 (2009)Cite this article

Music is a ubiquitous element in our daily lives, and was probably just as important to our early ancestors. Fragments of ancient flutes reveal that music was well established in Europe by about 40,000 years ago.

Conard recently reported2 the discovery of a female figurine carved from mammoth ivory in an Aurignacian layer at Hohle Fels dated to at least 35,000 years ago (based on the newly calibrated radiocarbon timescale). At present, this is the earliest such find in the world. Additional examples of figurative art — of mammoths, horses, bison, cave lions, waterfowl and half-human, half-animal 'therianthropes' — have also been found in Aurignacian layers at Hohle Fels and other sites in the Swabian Jura. These finds suggest that the region was inhabited by a population of Homo sapiens sapiens that had mastered, among other things, the manipulation of mammoth ivory into three-dimensional, naturalistic forms for purposes not directly related to daily economic needs. Just as we continue to do today, these hunter–gatherers produced symbolic objects that embodied complex beliefs shared by a larger community of individuals.

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Figure 1: Sounds old.

H. JENSEN/UNIV. TÜBINGEN

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Daniel S. Adler is in the Department of Anthropology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut 06269, USA. daniel.adler@uconn.edu,

    Daniel S. Adler

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  1. Daniel S. Adler
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Adler, D. The earliest musical tradition. Nature 460, 695–696 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/460695a

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