Talk two

The First Instrument

Whether a 60,000-year-old bone could be the oldest known musical instrument, and why thirty years of evidence has not closed the question.

What the room gets

• What the artifact is, and what each side actually claims
• Why the openings in a broken bone are central to the dispute, and what else the two camps are arguing about
• What imaging and replication can and cannot settle
• What it would mean, for music and for us, if the carnivore reading is wrong
• Why we keep needing the answer to be yes

Where it comes from

In 1995 Ivan Turk's team pulled the left femur of a cave bear cub out of Divje Babe in Slovenia. It is 11 centimetres long, between 50,000 and 60,000 years old, and it carries two complete holes through the shaft. At each broken end sits a further opening, only partly preserved.

Turk and his colleagues read those openings as finger holes broken through later, which would make the bone a Neanderthal flute and the oldest known musical instrument. Francesco d'Errico, April Nowell, Philip Chase and others read the whole pattern as the punctures of a carnivore's teeth. Imaging and replication experiments have added evidence on both sides without producing agreement across the field.

In 2022 I went to Slovenia and stood inside that cave, in the space where it was found. This talk is what the argument looks like from the inside: the evidence each side holds, and why a question about a few openings in one bone has occupied archaeologists, musicologists and audiologists for three decades.

To be clear about what this is: I play several flutes. I do not play this one, and there is no demonstration in the talk. What I bring is the research, the dispute, my time inside the cave, and what happens when a room meets the question for the first time.