Music has always been a fundamental component of human culture, and perhaps it could even precede the birth of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. To say it is some scholars, who have attributed to the Neanderthal the oldest musical instrument ever found: a flute dating back to 60 000 years agoknown as Flute of Divje Babefrom the name of the archaeological site in Slovenia where it was discovered, in 1995, by an expedition led by the archaeologist Ivan Turk.
This flute, partially broken, was obtained from the left femur of a young cave bear And it has four holes (two of which are incomplete, at the ends), whose dimensions and position have made it think of numerous archaeologists who have been made with the intention of making the bone ring. Throughout the find is 11.36 cm long (originally, the entire diaphysis of the femur had to measure on 21 cm).
The layer in which the discovery took place had been dated with the radio control approximately to 43 100 years ago, and given the characteristics of the find and the context, where neanderthal stone tools were also found, Turk called him “Neandertilian flute“. However, there is no total consent on this definition: preserved in Narodni Muzei Slovenenijethe Slovenian National Museum of Ljubljana, the flute is in fact the subject of a dispute on the civilization that created it.
On the one hand, Other examples of neanderthal musical instruments are not known And a discovery of the genre dating back to the medium (Musterian) Paleolithic could indicate previously unknown behavior. Some scholars are even convinced that it is not at all of an instrument but a simple laundry or bitten bone, and have pointed out that the divje babe flute is about 20 000 years older than other flutes made by human beings.
On the other, the Slovenian National Museum is said to be convinced that the instrument (also called “Tidldibab”)) has actually been built by the Neanderthalwhich according to them would confirm how the Neanderthals were very similar to the homo sapiens sapiens and who had their own artistic expression. The museum maintains that the tests presented by Turk in 2005 “finally refuted the hypothesis that the bone had been perforated due to the bite of a bear”, and that the manufacture by the Neanderthals was “tried in a reliable way”, theory then reconstructed on an experimental level.
