Neandertal noisemaker.

Neandertals, whose evolutionary relationship to modern humans inspires much scientific sound and fury, apparently made some noise of their own -- perhaps even music. Amid stone implements typical of European Neandertals excavated last year in a Slovenian cave, researchers found a piece of a juvenile bear's thighbone that contains four artificial holes and resembles a flute.

Similar bone flutes have been recovered at several Homo sapiens sites in Europe and Asia dating from 22,000 to 35,000 years ago. A preliminary age estimate for the new find, however, places it at between 43,000 and 82,000 years old.

"This bone could have been used to make noise or, possibly, music," contends geologist Bonnie Blackwell of the City University of New York's Queens College in Flushing, N.Y. "It would not surprise me if this was a Neandertal musical instrument."

Blackwell and her colleagues, including excavation director Ivan Turk of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences in Ljubljana, are slated to publish an analysis of the flutelike bone and other discoveries at the Divje Babe I cave in an upcoming Geoarchaeology.

The ends of the hollow bone artifact are broken off, and the holes, which penetrate only one side of the shaft, run in a straight line. Neandertals probably produced the holes, possibly by using a carnivore tooth as a punch, according to Blackwell. Cave bears or other carnivores could have gnawed off the ends of the bones, she holds.

Five cave bear teeth from three sediment layers at the site were dated by a technique known as electron spin resonance. Researchers calculated a maximum and minimum age for the teeth based on measurements of minute amounts of radioactivity that the teeth had absorbed while buried and on estimates of periodic fluctuations in natural radioactivity levels in the cave soil.

Excavations at Divje Babe I began in 1980. Fossil remains unearthed so far consist primarily of more than 65,000 cave bear teeth. Other animals whose bones lie in the sediment include lions, leopards, ibexes (a type of wild goat), bats, and a number of rodent species.

Remnants of several hearths have been found as well, along with sharpened stone implements and debris from tool making. The flutelike bone turned up near stones and charcoal associated with a small hearth.

The Slovenian bone closely resembles several hole-bearing bones that were likely to have been used as musical instruments by humans at later European sites, according to archaeologist Randall K. White of New York University. White hopes to construct a model of the Divje Babe I bone artifact in order to explore the range of sounds that could have been produced by blowing into it.

"Neandertals were apparently quite similar to Homo sapiens in their behavior and cognitive capacities," Blackwell asserts. "In both groups, musical traditions probably extend back very far into prehistory." Map shows Divje Babe I cave's location in northwestern Slovenia. The flutelike bone unearthed in the cave contains four holes punched into one of its sides and may have been a Neandertal musical instrument.