In 1931, researchers working in the south of France excavated a large sea shell at the entrance to a cave. At first glance, it was inconspicuous and weakened for decades in the collection of a nearby natural history museum.
Now a team has revised the approximately foot-long shell cap using modern imaging technology. They concluded that the shell was deliberately chopped and pierced to turn it into a musical instrument. The team is an extremely rare example of a ‘shell horn’ from the Paleolithic period. And it still works – a musician recently drew three notes from the 17,000-year-old track.
“I needed a lot of air to maintain the sound,” said Jean-Michel Court, who conducted the demonstration and is also a musicologist at the University of Toulouse.
The Marsoulas Cave, at the foothills of the French Pyrenees, has long fascinated researchers with its colorful paintings depicting bison, horses and people. This is where the enormous brownish shell lid was first discovered, an irregular object that had to be transported from the Atlantic Ocean, more than 150 kilometers away.
Despite its leverage, the shell, of the sea snail Charonia lampas, gradually slipped into oblivion. Presumably nothing more than a drinking vessel, the shell has been housed in the Natural History Museum of Toulouse for more than 80 years.
Only in 2016 did researchers start analyzing the shell anew. Artifacts like this concave help paint a picture of how cave dwellers lived, said Carole Fritz, an archaeologist at the University of Toulouse, who has been studying the cave and its paintings for more than 20 years. “It’s hard to study cave art without a cultural context.”
Dr. Ftiz and her colleagues began compiling a three-dimensional digital model of the conc. They immediately noticed that some parts of his shell looked peculiar. To begin with, a portion of his outer lip was broken off. It left a smooth edge, unlike Charonia lampas, Gilles Tosello, a prehistorian and visual artist, also told the University of Toulouse. “Normally they are very irregular.”
The top of the concave was also demolished, the team found. This is the strongest part of the shell, and it is unlikely that such a break would have occurred naturally. Further analysis shows that the shell was repeatedly – and precisely – struck near the apex. The researchers also noticed a brown residue, perhaps remnants of clay or beeswax, around the broken apex.
The mystery deepened when the team used CT scans and a small medical camera to examine the inside of the shell. They found a hole about half a centimeter in diameter that ran inward from the broken apex and pierced the inner structure of the shell.
All of these changes were intentional, the researchers believe. The smooth outer lip would hold the shell more easily, and the broken apex and adjacent hole would have allowed a mouthpiece – possibly the hollow leg of a bird – to be placed in the shell. The result was a musical instrument, the team concluded in their study published in Science Advances on Wednesday.
This shell could possibly be played during ceremonies or used to call gatherings, said Julien Tardieu, another researcher from Toulouse who studies sound perception. Cave settings tend to amplify sound, said dr. Tardieu said. “Playing this conch in a cave can be very hard and impressive.”
It would also have been a beautiful sight, the researchers suggest, because the concave is decorated with red dots – now fading – that match the marks found on the cave walls.
This discovery is credible, said Miriam Kolar, an archaeo-acoustician at Amherst College in Massachusetts, who studied horns from horns but was not involved in the research. “There is compelling evidence that the shell was adapted by humans to be an instrument that produces sound.”
While other “sea shell horns” have been found in places like New Zealand and Peru, no one is as old as this conch.
Dr. Fritz said it was amazing to hear how Dr. Court the conk play. His music has not been heard by human ears for many millennia, which made the experience particularly moving, she said.
“It was a fantastic moment.”