Ancient Bird Bones May Have Been Fashioned Into Flutes for Catching More Birds

The team acknowledged that there’s no guarantee that the perforated bones were necessarily blown, much less tools for hunting: “From the archaeological perspective, one fundamental problem is distinguishing between an artifact’s potential to produce sound and the confirmation that this artifact served that specific purpose,” they wrote.

And even if the bones were fashioned with sonorous intent—that is, they were made to make sound—there’s no guarantee that they were used in hunting. Perhaps they were some of the earliest musical instruments, for which archaeological evidence is often scant.

“The current research shows just how important it is to preserve the cultural finds uncovered during excavations, which continue to yield new insights and research directions into human culture, thanks to new methods and to collaboration among scholars in different disciplines,” said study co-author Rivka Rabinovich, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in the same release.

Indeed, ancient evidence is only as useful as modern technologies. It’s the same reason NASA has held onto samples of the Moon collected during the Apollo missions; scientific samples can only appreciate in value (unless they’re in a state of rapid degradation).

In time, more found artifacts may show what ancient sound-making tools look like in archaeological contexts. Or our methods for probing such artifacts will get better. Ideally, the two will work in concert to give us more than a glimpse of our sonorous past.

More: What Was the Earliest Music?

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