Doubts aired over Neandertal bone 'flute.'(Brief Article)

Amid much media fanfare, a research team in 1996 trumpeted an ancient, hollowed-out bear bone pierced on one side with four complete or partial holes as the earliest known musical instrument. The perforated bone, found in an Eastern European cave, represents a flute made and played by Neandertals at least 43,000 years ago, the scientists contended.

Now it's time to stop the music, say two archaeologists who examined the purported flute last spring. On closer inspection, the bone appears to have been punctured and gnawed by the teeth of an animal--perhaps a wolf--as it stripped the limb of meat and marrow, report April Nowell and Philip G. Chase, both of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

"The bone was heavily chewed by one or more carnivores, creating holes that became more rounded due to natural processes after burial," Nowell says. "It provides very weak evidence for the origins of [Stone Age] music." Nowell presented the new analysis at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in Seattle last week.

Nowell and Chase examined the bone with the permission of its discoverer, Ivan Turk of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences in Ljubljana (SN: 11/23/96, p. 328). Turk knows of their conclusion but still views the specimen as a flute.

Both open ends of the thighbone contain clear signs of gnawing by carnivores, Nowell asserts. Wolves and other animals typically bite off nutrient-rich tissue at the ends of limb bones and extract available marrow. If Neandertals had hollowed out the bone and fashioned holes in it, animals would not have bothered to gnaw it, she says.

Complete and partial holes on the bone's shaft were also made by carnivores, says Nowell. Carnivores typically break open bones with their scissorlike cheek teeth. Uneven bone thickness and signs of wear along the borders of the holes, products of extended burial in the soil, indicate that openings made by cheek teeth were at first less rounded and slightly smaller, the researchers hold.

Moreover, the simultaneous pressure of an upper and lower tooth produced a set of opposing holes, one partial and one complete, they maintain.

Prehistoric, carnivore-chewed bear bones in two Spanish caves display circular punctures aligned in much the same way as those on the Slovenian find. In the March Antiquity, Francesco d'Errico of the Institute of Quaternary Prehistory and Geology in Talence, France, and his colleagues describe the Spanish bones.

In a different twist, Bob Fink, an independent musicologist in Canada, has reported on the Internet (http://www.-webster.sk.ca/greenwich/fl-compl.htm) that the spacing of the two complete and two partial holes on the back of the Slovenian bone conforms to musical notes on the diatonic (do, re, mi ...) scale.

The bone is too short to incorporate the diatonic scale's seven notes, counter Nowell and Chase. Working with Pennsylvania musicologist Robert Judd, they estimate that the find's 5.7-inch length is less than half that needed to cover the diatonic spectrum.

The recent meeting presentation is "a most convincing analysis," comments J. Desmond Clark of the University of California, Berkeley, although it's possible that Neandertals blew single notes through carnivore-chewed holes in the bone.

"We can't exclude that possibility," Nowell responds. "But it's a big leap of faith to conclude that this was an intentionally constructed flute."