Europe's first modern humans carved flutes from vulture bones 35,000 years ago
In a German cave in 2008, archaeologists found a flute made from a vulture's wing bone, pierced with five finger holes and roughly 35,000 to 40,000 years old, the oldest undisputed musical instrument. Its makers belonged to the Aurignacian, the first culture that modern humans created in Europe, and they may have numbered only a few thousand.
The Aurignacian ran from about 43,000 to 26,000 years ago in most regions, and lingered in Ukraine until around 17,000 years ago. Named after the cave of Aurignac in southwest France, it followed the Neanderthal Mousterian. Its people descended from the wave of Homo sapiens that left Africa and passed through West Asia, and they are often called Cro-Magnons.
Their art is astonishing for its age. The same Hohle Fels cave that yielded the flute also gave up a Venus figurine, about 35,000 years old and the earliest undisputed depiction of a human being in prehistoric art, with exaggerated hips and breasts but tiny arms and feet. The Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, part human and part lion and dated to about 40,000 years ago, is the oldest known figurine of its kind. At Vogelherd Cave, ivory horses and mammoths were carved with a skill unmatched later in the era, and the paintings of Chauvet Cave in France date from this period too.
Their tools were refined: long flint blades struck from prepared cores, and bone or antler points with grooved bases. They hunted big game such as reindeer, travelling seasonally over long distances, though they ate more plants, fish and birds than Neanderthals had. Shells from the Mediterranean or Black Sea turn up at an Austrian site hundreds of kilometres away, hinting at wide exchange networks.
Their numbers were strikingly small. A 2019 analysis estimated an average of about 1,500 people across western and central Europe during the period, with an upper limit of 3,300. Yet their genetic legacy endured: DNA from Magdalenians in Iberia some 20,000 years later traced 70 to 80 percent of its ancestry to the population represented by an Aurignacian man from Goyet in Belgium.
Source: Aurignacian
