A French archaeologist has discovered the oldest musical instruments in the world in Israel. They date back more than 12,000 years. Explanations.
By Baudouin Eschapasse
© Laurent Davin
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ifwere they decoys used by hunters to attract birds? Or musical instruments involved in other occasions of life: ritual ceremonies, even festive evenings? Seven small flutes were found by a Frenchman in Israel. The lucky discoverer is called Laurent Davin. He is 33 years old and has worked for two years in the archeology laboratory of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
This Drôme, originally from the small village of Séderon (where his grandparents ran the local butcher’s shop for a long time), settled in Israel after completing a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne on the ornaments of the time of man Natufian, as we call our distant ancestor who settled in the Middle East fifteen millennia ago. (The Natufians lived between Lebanon and the Sinai Desert on the Mediterranean coast and as far as the Euphrates inland).
READ ALSOAnne Lehoërff: “Archaeology turns our historical knowledge on its head! » In the warehouses of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, founded in 1918 on Mount Scopus, Laurent Davin came across boxes of objects exhumed in Eynan-Mallaha, in northern Israel, between 1996 and 2005. “These boxes contained more than a thousand animal bones that I began to look at one by one, under the microscope, with a different eye from that of the archaeozoologists who had examined them until then. I was initially looking for traces that could have testified to the extraction of feathers to concoct adornments,” explains the scientist.
In the spring of 2022, he is on a videoconference with friends, who have stayed in France, when he notices a tiny bone pierced with small holes. “But it’s a flute!” he exclaims in front of his amazed interlocutors. Laurent Davin is not at the end of his surprises. Between 12,000 and 15,000 years old, fragments of other bones allow him to reconstruct six additional wind instruments.
READ ALSOStrange offerings to the dead spotted in a Parisian necropolisBut the adventure does not stop there. Last November, Laurent Davin went to the comparative anatomy laboratory of the Nantes veterinary school to identify the nature of these bones. “It turned out that they were moorhens close to our ducks today. I wanted to know what sound was coming out of it,” he continues. He begins to make, like prehistoric men, a flute by working on a bird carcass with a cut flint. “The experiment, conducted with Aurélia Borvon, enabled us to obtain a wind instrument strictly identical to the one I had identified in Jerusalem. »
All you have to do is blow into it. When he does so, a sound that strangely resembles that emitted by birds comes out. To test the hypothesis that it is a decoy such as one finds among the peoples of Papua New Guinea or certain Amerindian peoples, he must carry out new investigations. “To do this, I consulted the very rich database of the Natural History Museum to compare the noise and find out if it corresponded to a known species”, specifies the archaeologist.
READ ALSOWhen divers (amateurs) play archaeologists in IsraelBut the sound is too high-pitched to be the cry of a moorhen. After dozens of tests, Laurent Davin ends up discovering that the acoustics correspond to that of falcons. “The spectral analysis coincided perfectly,” says the researcher. It remains to be understood why prehistoric men sought to imitate the sound of this bird of prey. To drive him away? Not sure. “We found few falcon bones on the site. This bird was obviously not part of the Natufian diet,” analyzes Laurent Davin. The archaeo-anthropologist notes that the raptor has above all a symbolic role in this culture. “Their talons are used as ornamental adornment,” he says. As evidenced by rock carvings and clay bird figurines from prehistoric times, found nearby.
Did prehistoric man practice falconry?
What if this call had been used to tame birds of prey? We would be here in the presence of the oldest traces of falconry. As attractive as it is, this hypothesis remains unresolved. We can also consider that these flutes were used to hunt other species by scaring them. Another possibility would be instruments unrelated to hunting. “Many ethnic groups incorporate the sounds of nature into their musical compositions,” notes Laurent Davin, who is about to work for two years at the Israel Academy of Sciences. In any case, archaeologists will look differently at bird bones when they dig them up in the region.
*The study by Laurent Davin, published in Nature Scientific Reports with José-Miguel Tejero, from the University of Vienna, is available here. To hear the sounds made by these little flutes, click on this video.