35,000 years before iPods.

About 35,000 years ago, music fitted a cave in southwestern Germany when one of our Stone Age ancestors took a hollow bone from a griffon vulture, carved finger holes, and made one of the first flutes. Part of that flute was recently found in a cave near Ulm, Germany. Along with fragments of ivory flutes from the same area, archaeologists say, it represents the earliest known evidence of music-making in the Stone Age. Around the same time and in the same area, early Homo sapiens also carved the oldest known examples of sculpture. These people probably arrived in Europe 40,000 years ago, 10,000 years before the native Neanderthals became extinct. The Neanderthals, close human relatives, apparently left no evidence of having been musical.