Archaeologists have discovered the oldest wind instruments in the Near East, small flutes used more than 12,000 years ago to mimic the cry of a species of raptors that played a key role in the culture of local people.
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But damn, it's a flute! " exclaimed archaeologist Laurent Davin when he discovered last year that the seven objects excavated, the oldest in 1998, were wind instruments. "They were the bones of birds, arranged as such after the excavation, among a thousand others," and which once re-examined by the archaeologist revealed their secret. The place of discovery, Eynan-Mallaha, an archaeological site in present-day northern Israel, was home to Natufian culture 12,000 to 15,000 years ago.
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Homo sapiens had always been mobile. The hunter-gatherers of this culture are initiating a major change by becoming sedentary," says Laurent Davin, attached to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, lead author of the study published Thursday in Nature Scientific Reports with Jose-Miguel Tejero of the University of Vienna.
The object, tiny, was easy to ignore. Taken from the wing of a moorhen, the bone is less than ten centimeters long, and is pierced with small holes difficult to distinguish on the duct, which is less than half a centimeter in diameter.
The craftsmen had "a certain notion of acoustics", they understood that "the narrower the air duct, the higher the sound", says the archaeologist. With the result, when blowing into the object, to "imitate the song of raptors".
Calls?
To ensure this, the researchers made an exact replica of the Eynan-Mallaha flutes using a duck wing bone, worked with flint, at the Nantes veterinary laboratory. And compared the sound produced with that of more than sixty species of birds hunted by the Natufians and whose remains were found at the site. "The spectral analysis coincided exactly with that of the falcons," says Laurent Davin. It is the instrument imitating the song of a bird the oldest known to date, according to the scientist.
The identified raptor had a visibly important role in the culture of the Natufians, their talons being used as ornament of adornment. This hypothesis is supported by the discovery of clay bird figurines, at least one of which clearly represents a raptor (these works will be published).
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The flutes may have served as a call to hunt these birds, but researchers note that the site contains few remains of such birds. The hypothesis of their use for falconry is very difficult to prove.
That left that of their "integration into musical practices, and that's something we have a lot of examples of in ethnography," explains Laurent Davin. As among the Plains Indians, still today in the United States, who use in ceremonies flutes made from eagle bones. This is also the case, for example, "in Papua New Guinea where the songs of birds from the forest are included in the ceremonies," continues the archaeologist.
The fortuitous "discovery" of these instruments at Eynan-Mallaha should lead to a re-examination of other bone collections in the region. "It is very likely that they will be found elsewhere in the Middle East," concludes the researcher.