SLOVENIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

Bob Fink, a musicologist in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, has analyzed the carving in a piece of bone found in July 1995 by Slovenian archaeologist Ivan Turk, in a cave in what used to be northern Yugoslavia. From the placement of the holes, Fink concludes the instrument could produce four notes corresponding with the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth notes of a minor diatonic scale (one composed of half tones and whole tones).

Until now, says archaeologist Anne D. Kilmer of the University of California, Berkeley, the oldest definitive evidence for the use of seven-note diatonic scales came from 4000-year-old cuneiform tablets. And, according to Fink, the oldest known instruments were one-note whistle-type artifacts from 20,000 to 30,000 years ago.

Fink says the distance between the second and third holes on the bone is twice that between the third and fourth (where the bones' ends are broken). That means the first interval represents a whole tone and the second a half tone. "These three notes ... are inescapably diatonic," writes Fink in an essay on the Internet.

Fink based his analysis on photographs obtained from geologist Bonnie Blackwell, of Queens College in Flushing, New York, to whom Turk had sent teeth from the site for dating. "I think he's got the analysis right," says Blackwell. She says the flute is the "only musical instrument ever associated with Mousterian [Neandertal] culture." Its age is somewhere between 43,400 and 67,000 years--based on dating of sediments above and teeth below the flute's layer.

Fink says his analysis suggests that the human brain's perception of musical tones and what constitutes harmony is at least partly hard wired--a view bolstered by recent research showing that young babies can distinguish discordant from harmonious combinations of notes.