Archaeologists have managed to get almost perfect notes from a musical instrument that is more than 17,000 years old.
It is a shell found in a hunter-gatherer cave in the south of France.
The artifact is the oldest wind instrument of its kind. To date, only bone whistles can claim deeper heritage.
The discovery is reported in the journal Science Advances.
Its meaning lies in the dots as in the shell.
This corresponds to the artwork on the walls of the Marsoulas Cave in the Pyrenees where the artifact was excavated in 1931.
“It establishes a strong connection between the music played with the conk and the images and the performances on the walls,” explained Gilles Tosello of the University of Toulouse. “To our knowledge, this is the first time we can show a connection between music and cave art in European prehistory.”
The shell is 31 cm in its longest dimension and 18 cm in its widest.
It was, of course, once the home of a living organism; most likely a species called cold-water Atlantic snail Charonia lampas.
The shell must have been a valued object, as the shoreline where it was presumably captured or traded is more than 200 km away.
When the excavators of the 1930s looked at the shell for the first time at Marsoulas, they thought of nothing more than a ceremonial drinking cup.
But the analysis by a team led by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) turned the interpretation on its head.
The scientists identified the deliberate modifications that would improve the shell’s ability to make sound.
These include the hole cut out on one side, which allowed the insertion of a nozzle, and cuts on the other side that would make it easier to insert a hand to modulate the sound – on the same way as sticking their hand in the clock of the instrument to change the pitch.
The team asked a professional musician to blow in the conc, and to their delight he was able to generate notes near C, C-sharp and D.
“The intensity produced is incredible, about 100 decibels per meter. And the sound is very much focused on the axis of the shell opening,” said Philippe Walter of Sorbonne University.
Improvements in image processing were used to study the patterns painted on the inner surface of the shell opening.
These patterns, made with an iron oxide pigment (ocher red), have the shape of fingerprints. The walls of the Marsoulas Cave share this style. There is a bison picture, for example, detected by 300 fingertips.
The researchers produced a 3D-printed replica of the shell so that they could further investigate the musical possibilities of the shell without damaging the original artifact.
The Upper Paleolithic people who owned the shell were part of what archaeologists call the Magdalene tradition, which was notable for the particular approach to the manufacture of tools and the use of bone, antler and ivory.
It is also known that the communities of the Pyrenees deal with similar communities in the Cantabria region in northern Spain. The conch thus strengthens this relationship.
“The sound of this concussion is a direct link with the Magdalene people,” said Carole Fritz, CNRS’s lead scientist in the project team.
