A renewed study of a large conch shell, once accepted as a drinking cup, has revealed that it may be the oldest known warming instrument. The shell was discovered by archaeologists in 1931 along with prehistoric wall paintings in French Pyrenees and has since been housed in a museum marked as a ritual gilding. However, archaeologists from the University of Toulouse recently took a fresh look and concluded that it was transformed thousands of years ago into a windmill, as reported by the Associated Press.
Credits: Associated Press
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Archaeologists then invited a French horn player to discover that it was still working, producing a deep, plaintive bleat, like a fogorn from the past. The 12-inch shell carried C, C Sharp and D notes. “Hearing it for the first time, for me, was a great feeling – and a huge weight,” said the archaeologist Carole Fritz told AP the team initially feared the shell might break.
Shell had ‘unusual holes’
In a study of the shell that sat at the Toulouse Museum of Natural History, experts found “unusual holes” in the shell and deliberately breaking the top of the shell. They then performed another examination using a tiny medical camera and found that another hole had been carefully drilled in the inner chamber of the shell. In an addendum, they also found traces of red color on the mouth of the conch, matching a decorative pattern found on the wall of Marsoulas cave.
“This is truly classical archeology,” said Margaret Conkey, an archaeologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the research. “This discovery reminds us that life was much richer and more complex than just stone tools and large games. ”
In ancient times, conch shells were widely used for musical and ritual purposes in countries such as Greece, Japan, India, Peru among others. This particular Marsoulas shell, which experts believe is around 18,000 years old, is known to be the latest addition to the group. Earlier, a conch shell instrument found in Syria dates back to around 6,000 years, another Toulouse archaeologist Gilles Tosello called it AP.
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