Oldest shell wind instrument

An 18,000-year-old seashell that lay dormant in a French museum for 80 years that was believed to be a ceremonial drinking cup was, in fact, the first known example of a wind instrument made from a shell. The Upper-Palaeolithic artefact was discovered by archaeologists at the entrance to the Marsoulas Cave, in the French Pyrenees, in 1931, and had been left there by the Magdalenians, a Western European hunter-gatherer culture. The conch shell was on display at the Muséum de Toulouse until a team from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) concluded that its sliced-off tip and holes in the coils would have facilitated the fitting of a mouthpiece. It was also discovered that red, dot-like markings inside the shell, produced with the fingertips, matched the decorative artwork found inside the Marsoulas Cave. The 31-cm-long (1-ft), 18-cm-wide (7-in) horn, once a large specimen of the Atlantic sea snail (Charonia lampas), played musical notes close to C, C sharp and D – at an intensity of 100 dBA from 1 m (3 ft 3 in). The new findings were published in Science Advances on 10 February 2021.

Even older non-shell wind instruments have been discovered, including what is believed to be the world’s oldest example (perhaps of any instrument): a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal flute carved from bear bones that was unearthed in the cave of Divje Babe in Slovenia in 1995.