Hear the sound of an 18,000-year-old musical instrument

The shell was largely overlooked when it was found at the Marsoulas cave in the Pyrenees in 1931, but researchers from France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS); the Toulouse Museum; the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès; and the Quai Branly – Jacques-Chirac museum released an audio recording as part of a new study published Wednesday.

The people who made the instrument were probably hunter-gatherers. Credit: © Carole Fritz et al. 2021 / Gilles Tosello

The tip of the sea snail (Charonia lampas) shell is broken off, forming an opening 1.4 inches in diameter. The tip is the hardest part of the shell, the researchers said in a press release, so the breakage is not accidental.

There is also evidence of carving, perforation and decoration using hematite, a red pigment used in cave paintings for which the Marsoulas cave is famous.

The researchers worked with a horn player to verify their hypothesis that the shell was used to produce sounds, with the musician being able to produce sounds close to C, C-sharp, and D notes.

The fact that the opening is irregular and covered with an organic coating led researchers to believe that a mouthpiece was originally attached.

The presence of mouthpieces on other conch shells around the world adds weight to this interpretation, said Gilles Tosello, study co-author and archaeologist at the University of Toulouse.

Carbon dating carried out on charcoal and bear bone from the same archaeological stratum as the conch shows that the objects date from 18,000 years ago, the researchers said. This makes the shell the oldest wind instrument of this type.

However, the people who did that didn’t necessarily use the shell to make what we think of as music, Tosello told CNN.

“It could have been used as a communication tool,” he said, explaining that it could have been used in art-related rituals inside the cave.

The researchers also found similarities to materials found in caves along the Atlantic coast in northern Spain, lending weight to the idea that these people were nomadic hunter-gatherers who moved between the Atlantic coast and the Pyrenees, Tosello said.

They should have moved because they would run out of animals to hunt if they stayed too long in one place, he said.

Researchers will now work on an accurate 3D replica of the shell to find out more about a small 0.4-inch-diameter perforation in his body, Tosello told CNN. They will also study the distance traveled by the sound produced by the shell.