THE OLDEST MUSICAL INSTRUMENT IN THE WORLD IS THE NEANDERTHAL FLUTE

Archaeologists were split about a significant discovery in the late 1990s. In a Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) campsite in Slovenia, a group of researchers led by archaeologist Ivan Turk discovered a rare artefact. It looked like a flute, fashioned from a cave bear cub's femur. In honour of the archaeological location where it was discovered, the researchers from the Institute of Archaeology of the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts gave it the name "Divje Babe flute." It is the world's oldest musical instrument, dating back at least 43,000 years.

The discovery was viewed with scepticism because there are no more examples of Neanderthal musical instruments. Furthermore, scientists thought that the holes in the tube were caused by hyenas or other scavengers piercing and chewing on the bone. Nevertheless, Turk consistently refuted the allegations, and the flute is now a showpiece of the Slovenian National Museum in Ljubljana.

Musicologist Bob Fink noted in a 1997 essay that the flute had significant effects on the development of musical scales. Additionally, according to Fink, the arrangement of the holes verified that it was a flute and that the holes corresponded to the do, re, mi, and fa notes of a diatonic scale. Somewhere in a scale, the separation between the apertures corresponds to a whole tone and a half-tone. 

Fink claims that these three notes on the Neanderthal bone flute are unavoidably diatonic and will sound almost exactly like they belong in ANY type of standard diatonic scale, whether it be contemporary or archaic. "Unless we deny it is a flute at all, we just cannot imagine it being anything else."

In search of a clear-cut, useful solution, Ljuben Dimkaroski, a trumpet player with the Ljubljana Opera Orchestra, obtained a clay model of the flute in 2011. Since it was not comparable to contemporary wind instruments, the trumpet player had to think about how to play it for a while before figuring it out. Sašo Niskač chronicled the results in a short film in which Dimkaroski performs Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," Maurice Ravel's "Bolero, Maurice Ravel," and a number of traditional Slovenian tunes. In addition, the musician imitated animal sounds and used spontaneous improvisation.

According to a study by Turk and Dimkaroski, "the Mousterian musical instrument offers a unique insight into the Neanderthals’ symbolic behaviour and their cognitive abilities, along with some other findings from Divje Babe I." This contradicts the ideas of what the Neanderthals might have accomplished before their extinction.