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In 1931, researchers working in the south of France unearthed a large shell at the entrance of a cave. Insignificant at first glance, it languished for decades in the collections of a nearby natural history museum.
Now a team has reanalyzed the approximately one foot long conch shell using modern imaging technology. They concluded that the shell had been deliberately chipped and punctured to make it into a musical instrument. This is an extremely rare example of a ‘shell horn’ from the Paleolithic period, the team concluded. And it still works – a musician recently drew three notes from the 17,000-year-old shell.
“I needed a lot of air to maintain the sound,” explains Jean-Michel Court, who demonstrated and is also a musicologist at the University of Toulouse.
The Marsoulas cave, at the foot of the French Pyrenees, has long fascinated researchers with its colorful paintings of bison, horses and humans. This is where the enormous beige-colored conch shell was first discovered, an incongruous object that must have been transported from the Atlantic Ocean, over 150 miles away.
Despite its weight, the shell, which came from the sea snail Charonia lampas, has gradually slipped into oblivion. Presumed to be nothing more than a drinking vessel, the conch sat for more than 80 years at the Museum of Natural History in Toulouse.
It wasn’t until 2016 that researchers started to analyze the shell again. Artifacts like this conch help paint a picture of how cave dwellers used to live, said Carole Fritz, an archaeologist at the University of Toulouse who has studied the cave and its paintings for more than 20 years. “It is difficult to study rock art without a cultural context.”
Dr Ftiz and his colleagues began by assembling a three-dimensional digital model of the conch. They immediately noticed that some parts of her shell looked strange. To begin with, part of her outer lip had been chipped. This left a smooth edge, unlike the Charonia lampas, said Gilles Tosello, a prehistorian and visual artist also at the University of Toulouse. “Normally they are very irregular.”
The top of the conch was also severed, the team found. It is the strongest part of the shell, and such a fracture is unlikely to have occurred naturally. Indeed, a closer analysis showed that the shell had been struck several times – and with precision – near its top. The researchers also noted a brown residue, possibly remnants of clay or beeswax, around the broken apex.
The mystery deepened when the team used CT scans and a tiny medical camera to examine the inside of the conch. They found a hole, about half an inch in diameter, that ran inward from the broken top and pierced the interior structure of the hull.
All of these changes were intentional, the researchers say. The smoothed outer lip would have made the conch easier to hold, and the broken top and adjacent hole would have allowed a mouthpiece – possibly the hollow bone of a bird – to be inserted into the shell. The result was a musical instrument, the team concluded in their study, which was published in Science Advances on Wednesday.
This shell could have been played during ceremonies or used to convene gatherings, explains Julien Tardieu, another Toulouse researcher who studies sound perception. The cavern settings tend to amplify the sound, Dr Tardieu said. “Playing this conch in a cave could be very strong and impressive.”
It would have been a nice sight, too, the researchers suggest, as the conch is decorated with red dots – now faded – that match the markings found on the cave walls.
This finding is credible, said Miriam Kolar, an archaeoacoustician at Amherst College in Massachusetts who studies conch horn shells but was not involved in the research. “There is compelling evidence that the hull was modified by humans to become a sound producing instrument.
While other “shell horns” have been found in places like New Zealand and Peru, none are as old as this conch.
Dr Fritz said it was amazing to hear Dr Court play the conch. Her music hadn’t been heard by human ears for millennia, which made the experience particularly moving, she said.
“It was a fantastic time.”
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