Working as a warning horn, musical wind instrument, or perhaps even to alert your tribe to dinner on the table, the ancient residential cultures of the coast used conch shells as hearing aids for a number of purposes long before newer means of communication emerged.
In a rare find for researchers, the first ever shell used as a Paleolithic musical horn has been identified after it was forgotten for nearly 90 years after being found at the mouth cave in the French Pyrenees in 1931 by H. Bégouën and JT Russell. It was then said that man had no trace of human intervention and was eventually described as a “loving cup. ”
Dating back around 18,000 years, Ancient Europeans made this instrument from a great perspective and made musical notes out of it that we now hear for the first time in the Soundcloud clip below.
Recordings of this ancient conch shell converted to horn bring a time capsule into the sounds it could emit, tones that turned out to be close to the C music notes, D and C pointed. These humorous notes were extracted by a musicologist hired by the researchers, who used a metal mouthpiece today and blew it into the normal opening of the shell.
“I needed a lot of air to maintain the sound,” said Jean-Michel Court, who made the show.
According to a new open access study published last week in Science Advances, the amazing shell is a true example of C. lampas, molluscs emerging from the Northeast and North Seas. It is now found in Ireland and France (Brittany, Pas-de-Calais) at its northern border. Although rare, it still lives in the Bay of Biscay and the Basque and Asturian coasts of Spain.
This sea creature makes its home in rocky patches, often surrounded by layers of sand up to 200 feet deep. Although the use of this shell horn is not yet understood by prehistoric Europeans, conch shells are often used in historical and modern cultures as musical instruments, as well as being called. tools, and appearing as ceremonial objects.
“People played the sea horn inside Marsoulas Cave, which is located in the Pyrenees of France,” explained Toulouse University archaeologist Carole Fritz and her colleagues. “Wall paintings inside this cave show people, animals and geometric shapes. Researchers of the conch shell at the entrance to the cave in 1931 thought it had been used as a drinking material. shared. “
As pointed out in their paper, this previously unrecognized musical instrument was recovered from the collection of the Toulouse Museum of Natural History. The seashell horn was first found in the cave of Marsoulas (Haute-Garonne, France) in a Pyrenean pit. Marsoulas was the first decorated cave discovered in this area back in 1897 and has been a source of scholarly interest from the late 19th century to the present day.
When they re-examined the shell using microscopic techniques and imaging, scientists found evidence that someone had cut off a narrower head than the shell to create a funneled opening. A piece of cylindrical mouthpiece, possibly made from bird bone, appears to have been inserted into the hole.
Brown traces of some kind of resin or wax around the artificial opening may have come from a glue used to secure the mouth. Images of the inside of the shell showed a pair of holes carefully drilled in spiral rows under the opening.
Although not the oldest musical instruments in the world, such as 40,000-year-old European flu and ivory, this ultra-rare musical conch represents the oldest seashell horn ever played. ever discovered and remains a true monument with which you can better understand Paleolithic cultures.