Someone Played This 60,000 Years Ago
Before the Orchestra: The World's Oldest Musical Instruments and What They Tell Us
From a cave bear's femur found in a Slovenian cave to the golden lyres of Mesopotamia, the archaeological record of human music is stranger, older, and more debated than any history book suggests.
The Question
When did humans first make music? It is one of archaeology's most contested and most fascinating questions — partly because the answer keeps changing every time someone takes a closer look at a punctured piece of bone, and partly because the instruments that survive are only those that happened to be made from materials durable enough to outlast the civilisations that created them. Wood, gut, hide, bamboo: all gone. What remains is stone, ivory, fired clay, and bone — a narrow filter through which to understand the full breadth of our musical past.
What the archaeological record does preserve, however, is extraordinary: a vulture wing bone flute from a German cave, older than 40,000 years; a Neanderthal flute from Slovenia that may push music's origins back to 60,000 BCE; crane bone instruments from China still capable of producing recognisable scales after 9,000 years; golden lyres from Mesopotamia restored from liquid plaster poured into the void left by decayed wood. Each of these objects carries, within its physical structure, an argument about human nature.
Photo by Regös Környei on Unsplash — free under the Unsplash Licence
The Oldest Candidate
The Divje Babe Flute: A 60,000-Year Argument
The Divje Babe Flute — The Most Contested Object in Musical History
In 1995, archaeologist Ivan Turk and his team from the Institute of Archaeology at ZRC SAZU uncovered an unusual object in the Palaeolithic cave site of Divje Babe I in western Slovenia: a left femur diaphysis belonging to a one- to two-year-old cave bear cub, pierced with what appeared to be four evenly spaced holes. The object was found cemented into the breccia in the immediate vicinity of a Neanderthal hearth. According to the Divje Babe Archaeological Park, "The discovery confirmed that Neanderthals were already creating music more than 60,000 years ago, demonstrating advanced creativity, symbolic expression, and a rich cultural world."
The debate that followed has never fully closed. The crucial question, as a 2020 peer-reviewed paper in Applied Sciences (MDPI) put it, was "related to the origin of the holes. These could only have been made either by a carnivore or by human intervention." Researchers testing both hypotheses found that "results of experimental testing of both hypotheses do not support a carnivore origin of the holes." Furthermore, History Facts notes that "through careful replication of the item, musicologists discovered that the pitches created by blowing into the bone and varying finger placement on the holes matched the notes of the standard diatonic scale."
The original artifact is preserved in the National Museum of Slovenia in Ljubljana, where it remains on prominent display. Because Homo sapiens did not arrive in Europe until around 40,000 years ago, the instrument — if it is one — can only be attributed to Neanderthals, making it the single most significant object in the argument that musical behaviour predates modern humans.
Sources: Divje Babe Archaeological Park; Turk et al., Applied Sciences (MDPI), 2020; History Facts, Feb 2025
The Confirmed Oldest
The Swabian Jura Flutes: More Than 40,000 Years Old
Set aside the Divje Babe debate and the next candidates are less contested — though no less remarkable. In the Swabian Jura region of southern Germany, excavations at Hohle Fels and Geißenklösterle caves have yielded what Wikipedia's article on musical instruments calls "the more commonly accepted" oldest known musical instruments: "mammoth bone and swan bone flutes have been found dating back to 30,000 to 37,000 years old in the Swabian Alps of Germany. The flutes were made in the Upper Paleolithic age."
The most precisely dated of these came from Hohle Fels. The Mystic Keys, citing radiocarbon dating, notes: "Radiocarbon dating placed this flute at over 40,000 years old. That makes it one of the oldest musical instruments in history. Researchers confirmed it could produce multiple pitches, likely forming a simple scale." At Geißenklösterle, a separate flute carved from mammoth ivory was found in 31 pieces. As reported by Don's Maps — citing the research team of Nicholas Conard from the University of Tübingen — the flute "is 18.7-centimetre-long, carved from mammoth ivory, has three finger holes and would have been capable of playing relatively complex melodies."
"Music has been an integral part of human civilization for tens of thousands of years. Archaeological discoveries of ancient musical instruments, such as bone flutes and lyres, reveal the deep cultural and spiritual significance of music in early societies."
— The Archaeologist
What these instruments prove — beyond their remarkable age — is that Homo sapiens, within the first few thousand years of their arrival in Europe, were already producing objects of considerable technical refinement. These are not random perforated bones. They are deliberately constructed, precisely calibrated instruments capable of producing musical scales.
Left: Photo by Huichao Ji on Unsplash, Boston, MA. Right: Photo by Kiwihug on Unsplash. Both free under the Unsplash Licence.
The Oldest Playable
The Jiahu Flutes: 9,000 Years Old and Still in Tune
The Jiahu Flutes — The Oldest Playable Instruments Ever Found
In the Yellow River Valley of central China, at an early Neolithic site called Jiahu, archaeologists have made one of the most extraordinary musical discoveries on record. The site — occupied from 7000 BC to 5700 BC — yielded, among thousands of other artefacts, a collection of bone flutes that the Metropolitan Museum of Art describes as follows: "Fragments of thirty flutes were discovered in the burials at Jiahu, and six of these represent the earliest examples of playable musical instruments ever found. The flutes were carved from the wing bone of the red-crowned crane, with five to eight holes capable of producing varied sounds in a nearly accurate octave."
The research, published in the journal Nature in 1999 by Zhang, Harbottle, Wang, and Kong (Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology of Henan Province and Brookhaven National Laboratory), described "six exquisitely made complete flutes which were found in radiocarbon-dated excavation layers, along with fragments of perhaps 30 more. The flutes are made from the ulnae of the red-crowned crane (Grus japonensis Millen) and have 5, 6, 7 and 8 holes."
The tonal analysis of the best-preserved flute was remarkable. As CBS News reported in 1999, citing Garman Harbottle of Brookhaven National Laboratory: "You would never have one of these flutes in a symphony. But clearly, these people knew what an octave sounded like." The flute's seven holes produced "a rough scale covering a modern octave, beginning close to the second A above middle C." A small auxiliary hole had even been drilled next to the seventh hole — an apparent tuning correction — "which had the effect of raising that hole's tone from roughly G-sharp to A, completing the octave."
Sources: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Zhang et al., Nature, 1999; CBS News, 1999
Yun Kuen Lee, an expert on Chinese archaeology at Harvard University, described the Jiahu flutes to Science as "really spectacular," adding that while "we can only speculate" about what the music meant to the people of Jiahu, traditional healers or shamans may have played the flutes during religious rituals. This interpretation is supported by the broader archaeological context: excavators at Jiahu also found pottery jars containing residue of what has been identified as the world's oldest alcoholic beverage — a mixture of rice beer, honey mead, and hawthorn or grape wine, almost 9,000 years old, according to Guinness World Records.
The First Strings
The Lyres of Ur: The World's Oldest Surviving Stringed Instruments
In 1929, during excavations at the Royal Cemetery of Ur — a joint expedition of the British Museum and the University of Pennsylvania Museum — archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered the fragmented remains of four stringed instruments amid the skeletal remains of ten women in burial pits. One skeleton, he recorded, was found lying against a lyre with her hand placed where the strings would have been.
Wikipedia's article on the Lyres of Ur records their date as "the Early Dynastic III Period of Mesopotamia, between about 2550 and 2450 BC, making them the world's oldest surviving stringed instruments." The wood had entirely decayed, but the instruments were covered in non-perishable materials — gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and shell inlay. Woolley's solution was to pour liquid plaster into the cavity left by the decayed wood, preserving the form. The British Museum describes the Silver Lyre from the Royal Cemetery as having been "played in Mesopotamia (modern-day southern Iraq) over 4,000 years ago" and made of "lavishly decorated silver and red limestone."
Three lyres and one harp were unearthed in total. The finest — the Golden Lyre of Ur, or Bull's Lyre, featuring an elaborately crafted lapis lazuli-bearded bull's head — was sent to the Iraq Museum in Baghdad. It was destroyed by looters in 2003. The Queen's Lyre and Silver Lyre are held at the British Museum. The Bull Headed Lyre is at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia.
The Hurrian Hymn: The Oldest Known Musical Notation
In the 1950s, archaeologists discovered clay tablets in the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit. Among 29 tablets found at the site, one — denoted h.6 — was well enough preserved to allow reconstruction. The Vintage News reports that it "is the oldest known piece of musical notation and includes lyrics, a sequence of notes to be played on a harp-like instrument, as well as detailed instructions to the musician regarding intervals and tuning." The Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal, goddess of the orchards, dates to approximately 1400 BCE. "Only one of the 29 tablets found at the site, denoted h.6, was well enough preserved to allow reconstruction of the mystical melody. Several versions of the song have been produced, but we can only listen to a small part of the Hurrian hymn." Source: The Vintage News, April 2018.
The Meaning
What These Instruments Tell Us About Human Nature
The geographical and temporal spread of the earliest musical finds is, in itself, revealing. From Neanderthal-era Slovenia to Neolithic China, from Bronze Age Mesopotamia to Pharaonic Egypt, every major early civilisation independently developed instruments — wind, string, and percussion — and integrated them into ritual, ceremony, and daily life. The How Humans Evolved survey of the archaeological record confirms that "every culture, past or present, includes music." Music is not a luxury that emerged after survival was secured. It appears to be constitutive of human community itself.
The Jiahu research published in Nature noted that "ancient Chinese tradition held that there were strong cosmological connections with music: that music is part of nature. In this context, the performance of rituals and music were specifically associated with matters of state and sound government." The Lyres of Ur — found buried with the court women of Mesopotamia — suggest a similar integration of music into the highest levels of social and spiritual life. Music, in these cultures, was not entertainment. It was cosmology enacted through sound.
"The Song of Seikilos is the oldest complete surviving music composition in the world engraved in a marble stele that served as a flower stand."
— Ancient Origins
Source: Ancient Origins
The Seikilos Epitaph adds a final, deeply human dimension to this history. Discovered near a railway construction site in Turkey in 1883, its inscription reads — in translation — "While you live, shine / have no grief at all / life exists only for a short while / and Time demands an end." A man named Seikilos carved this song onto a gravestone for someone named Euterpe, possibly his wife, sometime in the first or second century AD. Because of the song's brevity, he was able to carve it whole — melody, notation, and lyrics — onto the stone's surface. Classic FM notes it as "the oldest surviving complete musical composition from anywhere in the world." It has been reproduced in over 65 books and more than 1,500 articles.
The limits of what we know
Wikipedia's article on musical instruments notes a critical methodological caveat that applies to everything above: "Artifacts made from durable materials or constructed using durable methods, have been found to survive. As such, the specimens found cannot be irrefutably placed as the earliest musical instruments. Recent studies indicate early hominins produced their percussive instruments from perishable materials like wood and animal hide, which the passing of time likely destroyed the artifacts beyond recovery." The instruments we know are only the instruments that happened to be made of things that last. The full history of human music almost certainly begins earlier — and sounds very different — than any bone or stone can tell us.
Final Word
Every civilisation that has ever existed made music. That fact alone is the most important thing archaeology has ever told us about being human.
Sources & Citations
- Divje Babe Archaeological Park — The Neanderthal Flute. Original find context; 60,000 year date; national museum display. divje-babe.si
- Turk, I. et al. — The Neanderthal Musical Instrument from Divje Babe I Cave (Slovenia): A Critical Review of the Discussion. Applied Sciences (MDPI), 10(4), 1226, 2020. Experimental testing; hole origin. mdpi.com
- History Facts — What Was the First Musical Instrument?, February 5, 2025. Diatonic scale replication; 50,000–60,000 year date; Homo sapiens arrival at 40,000 BP. historyfacts.com
- Wikipedia — Musical Instrument. Swabian Alps mammoth/swan bone flutes, 30,000–37,000 years old. en.wikipedia.org
- The Mystic Keys — Oldest Musical Instruments in History, May 3, 2025. Hohle Fels vulture bone flute; 8.5 inches; five holes; radiocarbon dating over 40,000 years. themystickeys.com
- Don's Maps — Geißenklösterle mammoth ivory flute, 18.7 cm, three finger holes, 31 pieces; Conard, University of Tübingen. donsmaps.com
- The Archaeologist — The Oldest Known Musical Instruments, August 28, 2025. thearchaeologist.org
- Zhang, J., Harbottle, G., Wang, C., Kong, Z. — Oldest Playable Musical Instruments Found at Jiahu Early Neolithic Site in China. Nature, 1999. Six complete flutes; red-crowned crane ulnae; 5–8 holes; 7000–5700 BC. nature.com
- Metropolitan Museum of Art — Jiahu (ca. 7000–5700 B.C.). Thirty fragments; six earliest playable instruments; five to eight holes; nearly accurate octave. metmuseum.org
- CBS News — A 9,000-Year-Old Tune, 1999. Harbottle quote; "do-re-mi" scale; G-sharp to A tuning hole; "a flourishing, rich culture" (Keightley, UC Berkeley). cbsnews.com
- Guinness World Records — What Did Ancient Society Sound Like? We Can Learn from These 9,000 Year-Old Bones, June 2025. Harvard's Yun Kuen Lee quote; oldest alcoholic beverage at Jiahu. guinnessworldrecords.com
- Wikipedia — Lyres of Ur. Early Dynastic III Period, 2550–2450 BC; world's oldest surviving stringed instruments; Woolley; ten women in burial pits. en.wikipedia.org
- British Museum — A History of World Music in 15 Instruments. Silver Lyre of Ur, 2600 BC; "played in Mesopotamia over 4,000 years ago"; lavishly decorated silver and red limestone. britishmuseum.org
- The Vintage News — The Seikilos Epitaph: The World's Oldest Complete Song, April 2018. Hurrian Hymn h.6; oldest musical notation; harp-like instrument; 29 tablets. thevintagenews.com
- Wikipedia — Seikilos Epitaph. "Ancient Greek inscription that preserves the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation." Dated 1st–2nd century AD; found 1883 in Tralles; National Museum of Denmark. en.wikipedia.org
- Classic FM — Seikilos Epitaph: Engraved on a Tombstone Almost 2,000 Years Ago. "Oldest surviving complete musical composition from anywhere in the world." classicfm.com
- Oldest.org — 8 Oldest Musical Instruments in the World. Tutankhamun's trumpets; "the only ones that have survived from ancient Egypt and are over 3,000 years old"; discovered 1922 by Howard Carter. oldest.org
- How Humans Evolved (snakecult.net) — Earliest Known Musical Instruments (Archaeological Evidence). Divje Babe, Swabian Jura, global bullroarers; "every culture, past or present, includes music." snakecult.net
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