Scientists from China and the US have excavated what must rank as the oldest known playable musical instrument in the world, a 9,000-year-old flute made from a bird bone. A collection of six flutes was recovered in the dig at Jiahu in Henan Province in China, and one of them was still playable.
The excavations by the Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology in Henan, the University of Science and Technology of China in Anhui, the Institute of Botany in Beijing and the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York are described in the current issue of Nature. The authors discuss activity at the Jiahu site but the flutes dominate their report.
They found six "exquisitely made complete flutes" and fragments from about 30 more. Radiocarbon dating established their age at between 9,000 and 7,700 years. They were made from the bones of the redcrowned crane and had between five and eight holes each.
One instrument "has been played and tonally analysed", according to the report, and a musician, Taoying Xu, recorded a fragment of a Chinese folk song called Xiao Bai Cai (Chinese Small Cabbage) on the flute to show that it worked.
"The discovery of complete, playable multi-note flutes at Jiahu presents us with a rare opportunity to hear and analyse actual musical sounds as they were produced nine millennia ago," the authors write in Nature. "Earlier flutes have been found in Neanderthal contexts, but they are so fragmentary that it is difficult to do more than guess their tonal production."
Initial attempts to play some of the instruments produced "cracking sounds", so the experiments were immediately stopped. The researchers plan to make exact replicas in material with a similar density to bone so that the "tonal sequences" of all the instruments can be studied "without endangering the valuable artefacts themselves".
The flute recording, made at the Music Institute of the Art Research Institute of China, can be heard on the Internet by reaching the Nature Website at http://www.nature.com/