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Archaeologists discover and replicate earliest musical instrument in the Middle East

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Archaeologists are hearing for the first time how humans made music some 12,000 years ago, by recreating a flute that was likely used to hunt ducks and other small birds in northern Israel.

On Friday, a team of Israeli and French researchers published an article about the recreated bone flute in the peer-reviewed Nature Scientific Report, offering an auditory window into how early humans shifted from hunter-gatherers to more settled villages, creating the earliest known musical instruments ever discovered in the Middle East.

The French-Israeli team of archaeologists discovered fragments of seven different flutes, dating to around 10,000 BCE, which is the largest collection of prehistoric sound-producing instruments ever found in the Levant. The pieces were found at the Eynan/Ain Mallaha site, a small village some 35 km (20 miles) north of the Sea of Galilee. The site was inhabited from 12,000 BCE to 8,000 BCE, around the time when humans were undergoing a massive revolution from nomadic hunter-gatherers to more sedentary, semi-settled communities.

Dr. Laurent Davin, a post-doctoral fellow at Hebrew University, was examining some of the bones recovered from the site when he noticed tiny holes drilled at regular intervals along a few of the bones. At first, experts had dismissed the holes as regular wear and tear on the delicate bird bones. But Davin examined the bones more closely and noticed that the holes were at very even intervals, and clearly created by humans.

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“One of the flutes was discovered complete, and so far as is known it is the only one in the world in this state of preservation,” Davin said in a press release that accompanied the article’s publication.

Dr. Hamoudi Khalaily, a senior researcher with the IAA, spent 10 years excavating at the Eynan site and was instrumental in creating a replica of the extant flute.

“There were a lot of doubts that this was even possible [to recreate], but the replica was created exactly [in the same way] as the original and it allowed us to hear what people would have heard 12,000 years ago,” Khalaily told The Times of Israel.

“When we first heard it, it gave us this feeling like, we are really doing something for history,” Khalaily said.

The recreated flute produces a screeching, breathy whistling sound that Khalaily and the team believe could be an imitation of predator birds, including falcons, which eat small waterfowl.

“The sound could have attracted predator birds, which creates chaos with the other birds, and then it’s very easy to catch them, even with your hands,” explained Khalaily.

Previously, nomadic hunter-gathers had focused on bigger game such as gazelles, rabbits, or foxes. But when humans began settling in the Hula Valley for the first time, they started taking advantage of new food sources, including fish and smaller waterfowl in the lake that used to stretch across the Hula Valley.

Today, the Hula Valley is still a major conduit for bird migration in the late fall when tens of thousands of birds pass through Israel on their way from Europe to Africa. The Hula Valley was once covered by water, with a 13 square kilometer (5 square mile) lake and 47 square kilometers (18 square miles) of seasonal swamps. Early Zionist pioneers drained the swamp in the early 20th century as a major infrastructure project to create more agricultural land and to combat malaria.

 

A trove of bird bones

At the Eynan site, archaeologists are excavating a small Natufian village, which was a Mesolithic culture in the Levant and Western Asia around 9000 BCE. It’s a unique time because the culture emerged when humans started living a semi-sedentary lifestyle predating the agricultural revolution, meaning they had to find regular food sources in the same area even before they knew how to cultivate them. Once humans became more settled, their culture underwent dramatic societal change including the appearance of burial practices, art, and durable structures.

The Eynan site was first excavated by a French mission in 1955 and later from 1996–2005 by a joint team from Israel and France directed by François Valla of the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and Khalaily of the Israel Antiquities Authority.

Excavations at the site are ongoing and it can take years to methodically sift through all of the earth removed from a site and search for fragments of tools, animal bones, or other detritus from daily life thousands of years ago. Over the past two decades, careful sifting has yielded 1,112 bird bones from the Eynan site.

Dr. Hamoudi Khalaily holds the original 12,000-year-old flute discovered in a Natufian village in northern Israel. (Hamoudi Khalaily/IAA)

The bone flute was researched and recreated by a team of French and Israeli experts, consisting of archaeologists and archaeozoologists, who study animal bones, ethnomusicologists, paleo-organologists (the research of ancient sound-making instruments), and technical experts that were able to find ways to recreate the exact placement of the finger holes.

The original flutes, also called aerophones because they are an instrument that produces sound due to vibrating air, were made from the hollow wing bones of the Eurasian teal and the Eurasian coot. The current replica was made from the wing bones of two female mallard ducks “because of the difficulty in obtaining carcasses of Eurasian coot (Fulica atra) used by the Natufians,” the article stated.

The tinier the bone, the more difficult it is to play. The researchers believe the bones were chosen specifically to mimic the calls of the Eurasian Sparrowhawk and the Common Kestrel, two birds of prey that were widespread in the Hula Valley.

Migrating Gray Cranes at the Agmon Hula Lake in the Hula Valley in northern Israel, November 16, 2017. (AFP Photo/Menahem Kahana)

The flute represents the oldest musical instrument found locally, but it is not the oldest aerophone that has been discovered. Most of the known Paleolithic sound-making instruments are found in Europe, and the oldest dates to around 40,000 years ago, which was found in southwestern Germany, made from bird bone and mammoth ivory.

Previous to this discovery, the only known “music” or sound production during the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods in the Levant was from a few studies suggesting that humans could have developed a belt of bone pendants that clacked and rattled, or possibly a bone whistle (flute with no fingerholes).

Fragments of seven flutes discovered in northern Israel that were likely used for hunting birds some 12,000 years ago. (Hamoudi Khalaily/IAA)

The flute represents an important discovery, but it’s not music to everyone’s ears.

“I heard it for the first time on Youtube, and it’s really a terrible tone, it’s high and pitchy and not nice at all to my ear,” said Prof. Rivka Rabinovich, the scientific director of archeozoological collections at the National Natural History Collections at the Hebrew University. Rabinovich, an expert in studying and interpreting the remains of ancient mammal bones has been studying the discoveries from the Eynan site for years.

Rabinovich added that there’s no way of knowing whether ancient humans had a similar cringe reaction when they heard it; whether it was used for hunting, communication, or making music.

But it opens a window into a fascinating point in human development, the complexity of society and their ability to make tools. The small finger holes in the flute were drilled with the talon of a larger bird, likely a falcon. Archaeologists believe that talons also had spiritual significance to early humans, Khalaily said.

The tiny finger holes drilled with talons at regular intervals in the 12,000-year-old flute discovered in northern Israel (Hamoudi Khalaily/IAA)

“It’s very interesting because this is just at the starting point of people becoming more sedentary,” Rabinovich said. “It’s a very exciting period at which to understand the day-to-day life and also larger questions beyond day-to-day life, and why they did certain things.”

She credited the discovery to the large and varied French-Israeli team, which united researchers and archaeologists with areas of expertise in niche areas like reconstructing bone tools and interpreting scratches made in animal bones.

“The message from this is that you really need to save everything [excavated from a site] because you always see these things with new eyes and new tools,” she said. “It takes a long time to sift through things, and when you look at it anew, you can see it differently. That’s because there’s continually new research, there’s continually new technology, and new ways to investigate new information. And it all works together to create a more complete picture of what happened there.”

Part of the research team, from left to right, Laurent Davin, Julien Navas, and Aurelia Bourbon with the recreated 12,000-year-old flute. (Laurent Davin)

The Eynan site hosted continuous human presence for around 4,000 years, with people living in round houses made of stones with animal hides or branches for roofs. In 8,000 BCE, when the agricultural revolution was well underway, humans abandoned the site, moving around 500 meters closer to the Hula Lake, whose contours had changed with time.

One of the most important tests on the flute is yet to come: In late fall, when the annual bird migration through the Hula Valley takes place, Khalaily plans to take the replicated flute to the Eynan site and play it there, in the same spot where humans created it 12,000 years ago.

“I want to go and see if we can make these voices, in hopes of attracting a hawk or falcon,” he said. “I’m naturally an optimistic person, but I do really think it will work. If we were able to replicate this sound, I’m certain it will bring those birds to us.”

 

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NASA to launch sounding rockets into moon's shadow during solar eclipse – Phys.org

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This photo shows the three APEP sounding rockets and the support team after successful assembly. The team lead, Aroh Barjatya, is at the top center, standing next to the guardrails on the second floor. Credit: NASA/Berit Bland

NASA will launch three sounding rockets during the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, to study how Earth’s upper atmosphere is affected when sunlight momentarily dims over a portion of the planet.

The Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path (APEP) sounding rockets will launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to study the disturbances in the created when the moon eclipses the sun. The sounding rockets had been previously launched and successfully recovered from White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, during the October 2023 .

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They have been refurbished with new instrumentation and will be relaunched in April 2024. The mission is led by Aroh Barjatya, a professor of engineering physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, where he directs the Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab.

The sounding rockets will launch at three different times: 45 minutes before, during, and 45 minutes after the peak local eclipse. These intervals are important to collect data on how the sun’s sudden disappearance affects the ionosphere, creating disturbances that have the potential to interfere with our communications.

The ionosphere is a region of Earth’s atmosphere that is between 55 to 310 miles (90 to 500 kilometers) above the ground. “It’s an electrified region that reflects and refracts and also impacts as the signals pass through,” said Barjatya. “Understanding the ionosphere and developing models to help us predict disturbances is crucial to making sure our increasingly communication-dependent world operates smoothly.”

A sounding rocket is able to carry science instruments between 30 and 300 miles above Earth’s surface. These altitudes are typically too high for science balloons and too low for satellites to access safely, making sounding rockets the only platforms that can carry out direct measurements in these regions. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The ionosphere forms the boundary between Earth’s lower atmosphere—where we live and breathe—and the vacuum of space. It is made up of a sea of particles that become ionized, or electrically charged, from the sun’s energy or .

When night falls, the ionosphere thins out as previously ionized particles relax and recombine back into neutral particles. However, Earth’s terrestrial weather and space weather can impact these particles, making it a dynamic region and difficult to know what the ionosphere will be like at a given time.

It’s often difficult to study short-term changes in the ionosphere during an eclipse with satellites because they may not be at the right place or time to cross the eclipse path. Since the exact date and times of the are known, NASA can launch targeted sounding rockets to study the effects of the eclipse at the right time and at all altitudes of the ionosphere.

As the eclipse shadow races through the atmosphere, it creates a rapid, localized sunset that triggers large-scale atmospheric waves and small-scale disturbances or perturbations. These perturbations affect different radio communication frequencies. Gathering the data on these perturbations will help scientists validate and improve current models that help predict potential disturbances to our communications, especially high-frequency communication.

This conceptual animation is an example of what observers might expect to see during a total solar eclipse, like the one happening over the United States on April 8, 2024. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

The APEP rockets are expected to reach a maximum altitude of 260 miles (420 kilometers). Each rocket will measure charged and neutral particle density and surrounding electric and magnetic fields. “Each rocket will eject four secondary instruments the size of a two-liter soda bottle that also measure the same data points, so it’s similar to results from fifteen rockets while only launching three,” explained Barjatya. Embry-Riddle built three secondary instruments on each rocket, and the fourth one was built at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

In addition to the rockets, several teams across the U.S. will also be taking measurements of the ionosphere by various means. A team of students from Embry-Riddle will deploy a series of high-altitude balloons. Co-investigators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts and the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico will operate a variety of ground-based radars taking measurements.

Using this data, a team of scientists from Embry-Riddle and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory are refining existing models. Together, these various investigations will help provide the puzzle pieces needed to see the bigger picture of ionospheric dynamics.

The animation depicts the waves created by ionized particles during the 2017 total solar eclipse. Credit: MIT Haystack Observatory/Shun-rong Zhang. Zhang, S.-R., Erickson, P. J., Goncharenko, L. P., Coster, A. J., Rideout, W. & Vierinen, J. (2017). Ionospheric Bow Waves and Perturbations Induced by the 21 August 2017 Solar Eclipse. Geophysical Research Letters, 44(24), 12,067-12,073. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076054

When the APEP- launched during the 2023 annular solar eclipse, scientists saw a sharp reduction in the density of charged particles as the annular eclipse shadow passed over the atmosphere.

“We saw the perturbations capable of affecting radio communications in the second and third rockets, but not during the first rocket that was before peak local eclipse,” said Barjatya. “We are super excited to relaunch them during the total eclipse to see if the perturbations start at the same altitude and if their magnitude and scale remain the same.”

The next total solar eclipse over the contiguous U.S. is not until 2044, so these experiments are a rare opportunity for scientists to collect crucial data.

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Royal Sask. Museum research finds insect changes may have set stage for dinosaurs' extinction – CTV News Regina

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Research by the Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM) shows that ecological changes were occurring in insects at least a million years before dinosaur extinction.

Papers published in the scientific journal, Current Biology, describe the first insect fossils found in amber from Saskatchewan and the unearthing of three new ant species from an amber deposit in North Carolina, according to a release from the province.

The amber deposit from in the Big Muddy Badlands of Saskatchewan, which was formed about 67 million years ago, preserved insects that lived in a swampy redwood forest about one million years before the extinction of dinosaurs.

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“Fossils in the amber deposit seem to show that common Cretaceous insects may have been replaced on the landscape by their more modern relatives, particularly in groups such as ants, before the extinction event,” Elyssa Loewen, curatorial assistant, said.

The research team was led by Loewen and Dr. Ryan McKellar, the RSM’s curator of paleontology.

“These new fossil records are closer than anyone has gotten to sampling a diverse set of insects near the extinction event, and they help researchers fill in a 17-million-year gap in the fossil record of insects around that time,” Dr. McKellar said.

The three ant species discovered in North Carolina also belonged to extinct groups that didn’t survive past the Cretaceous period.

“When combined with the work in Saskatchewan, the two recent papers show that there was a dramatic change in ant diversity sometime between 77 and 67 million years ago,” Dr. McKellar said in the release.

“Our analyses of body shapes in the fossils suggests that the turnover was not related to major differences in ecology, but it may have been related to something like the size and complexity of ant colonies. More work is needed to confirm this.”

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Meteors, UFOs or something else? Dawson City, Yukon, residents puzzled by recent sightings in night sky – CBC.ca

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Some residents in Dawson City, Yukon, say they’ve been seeing unusual things in the night sky lately — and it’s not the Northern Lights. 

But some might say it’s equally as fascinating.

Over the past few weeks, some residents have taken to social media to report seeing what they described as a fireball or meteor overhead. And last week, two residents said they both saw something similar.

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Naomi Gladish lives in Henderson Corner, a subdivision approximately 20 kilometres from downtown Dawson City. She told CBC News she saw something while walking her dog Friday morning.

“I looked up and saw a bright star,” Gladish said. “Or what I thought was a star.” 

“Within a fraction of a second, I realized it was actually moving quickly. And then as I watched it, a second later it grew a long tail.”

Dawson City resident Naomi Gladish said she saw something similar to the fireball shown in this image from the American Meteor Society. (American Meteor Society)

Gladish said the unknown object started to change into a pale blue colour, like a gas flame. Then, a few seconds later, it appeared to burn out.

“I could see fire, or coal,” Gladish said. “Like red glowing bits, breaking off of it. And then that was it. I tried watching to see if I could see any dark chunks falling from that spot, or carrying on from that spot, but the sky was dark.”

A minute or two after Gladish saw what she thought was a meteor, she heard a boom in the distance.

“My dog and I both turned our head to that exact direction that I had just seen it,” she said.”I figured it was related.”

Two women walking through snowy mountain terrain.
Naomi Gladish hiking with her sister at Tombstone Park. (Submitted by Naomi Gladish)

Dawson resident Jeff Delisle reported seeing something similar at about the same time. He then took to social media to ask if anyone else had seen it. Two people responded saying they had. 

“It flew right above me,” Delisle wrote.

“Pretty cool looking…. What is it?”

Likely not a meteor, says astronomer

Christa Van Laerhoven, president of the Yukon Astronomical Society, came across Delisle’s post and got in touch. She asked about what he’d seen, such as how long it was in the sky and the colour.

Van Laerhoven told CBC News that based on descriptions from both Delisle and Gladish, she doesn’t believe it could have been a meteor.

She says a meteor would have been moving much faster, and the colouring would have appeared differently. 

“Meteors can be any colour but … as a rule, are a consistent colour. What these people were describing had different colours. So the head looked blue and then the tail was more of an orange,” van Laerhoven said.

“That’s just something that doesn’t happen with meteors.”

a meteor
This zoomed-in still from a dashcam video captured in 2020 by Louise Cooke from Mount Lorne, Yukon, shows what one space science expert said appears to be an unusually-bright meteor travelling across the sky. (Submitted by: Louise Cooke)

Van Laehoven believes there may be another explanation for the recent unusual sightings: space junk, falling to earth.

“Space junk, when it comes in … comes through the atmosphere and starts glowing that can be more irregular, because of the variety of materials that go into a spacecraft.”

Van Laerhoven also suggested it could a very fast plane, or someone playing with rockets.

Gladish, however, doesn’t think anyone in Dawson was playing with rockets on Friday morning.

“Unless they’re talking about someone in China, or like a distant land playing with very high, powerful rockets … then sure,” she said.

“This was not something that someone in Dawson was doing … This came from much, much higher and it was much, much different to anything that would be locally caused.”

Van Laerhoven also dismissed another possibility: alien visitors.

“If aliens were coming to Earth, we would know,” she said.

“Simply because it would take them so much effort to get here that it would be very hard to imagine them getting here and not doing something dramatic enough that we would actually know about it.”

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