An 18,000-Year-Old Giant Conch Makes Music
The French National Center for Scientific Research in France shares the history of this musical instrument from the Pyrenean Magdalenians.
via Smithsonian
A team of researchers was studying the archaeological inventory of the Natural History Museum of Toulouse in France, when a large seashell caught their attention. First unearthed from the Marsoulas cave in the foothills of the Pyrenees Mountains in 1931, the conch—bigger than a human head—was filed together with other artifacts and sat inside the museum for decades. But when archaeologists took a fresh look, they realized it wasn’t just an ordinary oceanic fossil. They found that the conch had been carved into a wind instrument capable of producing specific notes—essentially a musical instrument that archaeologists propose may have been played for ceremonial purposes.
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