In flight, the Eurasian kestrel is mostly silent, a small falcon that seems to defy physics as it faces the wind and hovers in the air, its tail spread out like a fan. The bird of prey flaps its wings vigorously, catching every vortex of the wind as it scans the ground below for prey.
But high up in its breeding grounds, the kestrel lets out a series of rasping cries, each note being a syllable kik-kik-kik. In June, a team of Israeli and French archaeologists proposed that the Natufians, people of Stone Age culture in the Levant and western Asia, mimicked the raspy trills of the Eurasian kestrel 12,000 years ago with small notched whistles, or aerophones, carved from waterfowl. bones.
The flutes, discovered decades ago at a site in northern Israel but only recently inspected, may have been used as a hunting aid, for music and dance practice or for communication with birds over short distances, the study authors said. . their article in Scientific Reports.
“This is the first time a prehistoric sound instrument from the Near East has been identified,” said Laurent Davin, an archaeologist at the French Research Center in Jerusalem who made the discovery.
The theory is largely based on fragments of seven wind instruments that were part of the 1,112 bird bones excavated from Eynan-Mallaha, a prehistoric swamp village in the Hula Valley that continues to be an important passageway for the more than two billion birds that pass through each year. draw the river. African-Eurasian flight path. The Natufians inhabited the Levant from 13,000 to 9700 BC, a time when humans underwent a massive shift from nomadic hunter-gatherers to more sedentary, open-air semi-settled communities. The society featured the first sustainable stone-based architecture and the first cemeteries, with burial customs changing over time.
“The Natufians are witnessing a completely crazy period in human history, where they left behind the nomadic lifestyle that had been practiced since the dawn of man and settled in one place,” says Fanny Bocquentin, the chief archaeologist who has since 2022 is involved in the excavations. “It is a great responsibility, a challenge that they have successfully accepted, because in a way they gave rise to our way of life and our food regime.”
Dr. Davin noted that the valley’s settlers had to regularly find food sources before they even knew how to farm them. “Before then, they relied on game, such as rabbits, foxes and gazelles,” he said. The lake and seasonal marshes that almost covered the valley provided fish and abundant bird life, most of which were wintering waterfowl.
The swamp was drained in the early 1900s by Zionist pioneers as part of an infrastructure project and first excavated in 1955 by a French mission. Since then, careful sifting has yielded bones from a wide variety of local animal species. The flutes went unnoticed until last year, when Dr. Davin observed tracks on seven wing bones of Eurasian coots and Eurasian teals. Only one of the instruments was completely intact, and all of them were eight inches long.
Closer inspection revealed that the markings were small holes drilled into the hollow bones, and one of the ends of the intact flute had been cut into a mouthpiece. Initially, colleagues of Dr. Davin holes off as routine weathering. But when he subjected the delicate bones to micro-CT scans, he realized that the holes had been meticulously perforated and evenly spaced. The bones had been scraped and gouged with tiny stone blades, he said, and they showed traces of red ocher and microscopic wear patterns that indicated the aerophones had been used significantly. “The perforations were finger holes,” said Dr. Davin.
To test his theory, a team of archaeologists and ethnomusicologists made three replicas of the intact bone flute. Unable to obtain Eurasian coot or teal carcasses, the researchers used the wing bones of two female mallard ducks. Blowing into the replicas produced sounds that they compared to the calls of dozens of bird species flying through the Hula Valley. The pitch range was very similar to that of two species of raptors known to nest in the area: Eurasian kestrels and sparrowhawks.
The research team determined that the finger holes had been made with such precision with a flint tool that the holes could be sealed with a fingertip, which is a sine qua non for wind instruments. “It was a piece of cake for the Natufians to produce those flutes,” said Anna Belfer-Cohen, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She added that the society produced a wealth of tools and highly sophisticated utensils, beaded jewellery, pendants made of stone, bones, teeth and shells, as well as engraved bones and stone slabs.
There is fierce debate about the flourishing of music making in the deep past. The oldest flute attributed to modern humans is a five-holed aerophone found in 2008 in the Hohle Fels cave in southwest Germany. Carved from the wing bone of a griffon vulture, the flute may be 40,000 years old, making it one of the oldest instruments ever found.
But some scholars point to a Neanderthal artifact known as the Divje Babe flute, which was unearthed 28 years ago in a cave in northwestern Slovenia. That object, the left femur of a young cave bear, pierced with four distant holes, should be at least 50,000 years old. However, other scientists argue that the Divje Babe flute was simply the product of an Ice Age carnivore, possibly a spotted hyena, searching for a dead bear cub.
Hamoudi Khalaily of the Israel Antiquities Authority, who collaborated on the bird chirping study, has said that if the Natufians used the aerophones to flush birds out of the swamps, the discovery “would mark the earliest evidence of the use of sound in hunting ‘. In other words, the miniature flutes could have produced Stone Age duck sounds.
Natalie Munro, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, has an alternative hypothesis. “While we speculate, perhaps the instruments’ true purpose was to communicate with a completely different animal,” she said. Eynan-Mallaha was also home to a Natufian woman who was found buried with her hand resting on a puppy. The burial dates back 12,000 years and is a regular feature in stories of the early domestication of dogs. “Maybe these bones and their high-pitched sounds were more like dog whistles,” said Dr. Munro. “They could have been used to communicate with early dogs or their wolf cousins.”
Given the harsh tone of the flute, few scholars argue that it was intended as a melodic instrument. Yet, as John James Audubon remarked of a pair of American kestrels, “Side by side they sail and cry aloud their love-notes, which, if not musical, are doubtless at least delightful to the parties involved.”