Music is older than writing, but we will never hear the first songs. The oldest widely accepted musical instruments are flutes carved from bird bone and mammoth ivory, found in caves in southern Germany and made roughly 40,000 years ago. Singing, clapping, and stamping leave nothing behind, so those flutes mark some of the oldest surviving evidence of music, not necessarily the oldest music anyone made. When music began is unknown. What we can say is that a large 2019 survey found music in each of its 315 societies, and that brain scientists can watch the brain’s hearing and reward systems working together when a song gives someone chills. Why humans became musical at all is still debated.
How to read the labels on this page: [Documented] means the evidence shows it directly. [Strongly supported] means strong sources agree. [Plausible] means the evidence allows it but doesn’t prove it. [Disputed] means qualified experts disagree. [Unknown] means the evidence can’t answer the question.
What is the oldest evidence of music?
Six caves in the Swabian Jura, in southern Germany, have been excavated since the 1860s. Their layers from about 43,000 to 33,000 years ago hold carved animal figurines, ornaments, and musical instruments. In 2017, UNESCO listed the caves as a World Heritage Site and described those instruments as the oldest found anywhere to date (UNESCO World Heritage Centre). [Strongly supported], with one challenge covered below.
The star find is a nearly complete flute made from a griffon vulture bone, recovered at Hohle Fels cave in 2008. According to the University of Tübingen’s 2017 account, it is displayed at the Urgeschichtliches Museum in Blaubeuren.. The caves have also yielded flute pieces made from swan bone and mammoth ivory. According to the University of Tübingen, whose archaeologists have excavated there, modern replicas show these objects really are flutes you can play (University of Tübingen, April 19, 2017). [Documented]
Discovery doesn’t always happen with a trowel in a cave. In 2015, while sediment from Vogelherd cave was being washed and sorted, a 42-millimeter bone fragment turned up. Two partial finger holes and a reworked surface marked it as a flute made about 40,000 years ago. That sediment had been packed away in thousands of plastic bags (University of Tübingen 2017). [Documented]
Analogy: finding one of these flutes is like finding a guitar in an empty house. You know someone could play. You don’t know the songs, the audience, or the reason.
That is where the evidence stops. A flute shows planning, careful carving, and a sound-making tool. It does not show what melodies were played, who played them, whether the music was for ritual, fun, courtship, or comfort, or how anyone felt listening. [Unknown]
Did Neanderthals make music?
In 1995, excavators at Divje babe I cave in western Slovenia found a thigh bone from a young cave bear with holes in it. It lay in a layer the excavators link to Neanderthals and was later estimated at 50,000 to 60,000 years old, based on dates from finds around it. The excavation team and colleagues argue it is a Neanderthal-made flute, which would make it older than the German finds (Turk, Turk & Otte 2020).
Critics say the holes were made by carnivore teeth. Researcher Cajus Diedrich argues that Ice Age hyenas scavenging cave bear cubs left round-to-oval punctures in cub thigh bones, and that this explains the Divje babe holes (Diedrich 2015). Even the flute’s defenders write that the debate could only be closed by similar new finds (Turk, Turk & Otte 2020). [Disputed]
Did music begin in Europe?
Nothing shows that it did. [Unknown] Fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, dated by the research team to about 300,000–350,000 years ago, document early members of our species’ lineage in Africa (Hublin et al. 2017). That leaves a gap of more than 200,000 years before the oldest accepted flutes. Bones can’t fill that gap, because voices and body percussion leave no physical trace. Only instruments made of durable material survive (Honing et al. 2015, §2). [Strongly supported]
So why do the oldest accepted flutes come from Germany? Nobody can say for sure. Caves can shelter bone and ivory for tens of thousands of years, and UNESCO notes these caves’ “long and highly productive tradition of research” (UNESCO World Heritage Centre). It is [Plausible], but not established, that the map of oldest instruments partly reflects where things survived and where archaeologists have dug hardest.
Europe isn’t the only early musical story. At Jiahu, an early farming (Neolithic) village in central China, people grew rice and also hunted, fished, and gathered between about 7000 and 5800 BCE. Excavators there recovered more than 30 flutes from burials. All were made from the wing bones of red-crowned cranes. The researchers tested the notes of five of them and report that, over time, flute makers added holes and set the notes closer together (Zhang, Xiao & Lee 2004). [Documented as the authors’ finding, based on five flutes] The researchers believe the flutes had a special ritual role. That is their interpretation. [Plausible]
Do other animals make music?
It depends on what you mean by music. Henkjan Honing and colleagues separate musicality, the biological abilities that let a creature perceive and make music, from music, the cultural creations built on those abilities (Honing et al. 2015).
Some animals share pieces of musicality. Learning to make new sounds by ear, called vocal learning, and moving in time to a beat, called entrainment, are both uncommon in animals, yet each appears in some unrelated species (Hoeschele et al. 2015). One bullfinch learned a 45-note tune from a human tutor. Snowball, a sulfur-crested cockatoo, moved in sync with the beat of music and adjusted when the tempo changed. A California sea lion trained to follow a beat later kept time with music, and a chimpanzee fell into a beat on its own during a tapping task (same source, §4). [Documented in those studies]
Birds and humans are distant relatives, so scientists treat these shared skills as clues to how such abilities can evolve separately, not as ancestors of human music (Hoeschele et al. 2015, §2; Honing et al. 2015, §5 and Fig. 2). Whether any animal “has music” depends partly on how music is defined. [Disputed]
What happens in the brain when we hear music?
Neuroscientists Robert Zatorre and Valorie Salimpoor summarized the picture in 2013. Circuits in the auditory cortex encode and store tonal patterns. Loops linking auditory and frontal areas hold music in working memory and pick up its patterns, so listeners can predict what comes next. The auditory system also connects to movement-planning areas. The reward system, especially a region called the nucleus accumbens, tracks how rewarding a piece of music is. In their lab’s studies, listeners brought in music that gave them “chills,” and scans found dopamine, a chemical messenger, released in the reward regions most active around those peak moments (Zatorre & Salimpoor 2013). That hearing, memory, movement, and reward systems all take part is [Strongly supported]. How they produce pleasure is still being worked out.
Analogy: your brain is like a friend who keeps guessing the end of your sentence. When music plays with those guesses, the reward system pays attention.
Not everyone feels music’s pull. Some people report little or no pleasure from music, even though their hearing is normal and other rewards, like winning money, still work for them. In a 2016 study of 45 volunteers, the 15 people with this “specific musical anhedonia” showed weaker reward-system responses to music and less tightly related activity between the auditory cortex and the reward system during music listening (Martínez-Molina et al. 2016). [Documented]
How we know
- What evidence exists. Durable instruments in dated cave layers; modern replicas; ethnographic descriptions and field recordings from societies worldwide; brain scans; and animal experiments. Each answers a different question. None reaches back to the first song.
- Whose voices are missing. Every Ice Age musician. We have no names, no words, and no tunes. The worldwide song collections reach us through scholars who observed singing and wrote it down, or recorded it (Mehr et al. 2019, Figs. 1 and 4), so singers’ own explanations arrive filtered. Many communities control who may hear, record, or share certain songs. This page does not reproduce or link to specific songs for that reason.
- How power shaped the record. The Swabian caves have been dug for more than 150 years, and that attention shapes which finds exist to be dated. Some early comparative work on music also came with a ranking of the world’s peoples (Mehr et al. 2019, introduction). Charles Darwin, writing in 1871, used racist labels for other peoples and judged their music by European taste (Darwin 1871, vol. 2, p. 333).
Then vs. now
Then. Some nineteenth-century scientists treated music as a puzzle about bodies and evolution. Darwin reported that Herbert Spencer, in essays collected in 1858, argued music grew out of the rise and fall of emotional speech. Darwin disagreed. He suggested that human ancestors first used musical notes and rhythm “for the sake of charming the opposite sex,” before they had spoken language (Darwin 1871, vol. 2, pp. 336–337). He also ranked musical abilities among the “most mysterious” that humans have (p. 333).
Physician and physicist Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) took a different route. His 1863 book, translated into English in 1875 as On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, set out to connect the physics and physiology of hearing with music theory and aesthetics. Darwin cited Helmholtz when he wrote about music (1871, vol. 2, p. 333, note 29).
Now. Darwin’s courtship idea is still one live hypothesis. Others propose that music grew from caregivers’ song-like sounds to infants, that it strengthened group bonds, or that it is a human invention built from abilities that evolved for other reasons (Honing et al. 2015, §1). [Disputed]
Large cross-cultural studies help here. One team found music in all 315 societies it examined: 309 had evidence in eHRAF, a large database of anthropologists’ descriptions of societies, and six required other written descriptions by researchers. Songs were linked to settings such as infant care, healing, dance, and love, and varied more within societies than between them (Mehr et al. 2019). [Strongly supported] Another team, analyzing 304 recordings, found no absolute musical universal in its sample but many very common features. They suggested group coordination might tie those features together (Savage et al. 2015). [Plausible] A healing song documents what people did. It is not evidence that the song worked medically.
What we still don’t know
- When humans started making music. [Unknown]
- Whether Neanderthals made instruments. [Disputed]
- Why musicality evolved, or whether it was selected for at all. [Disputed]
- What Ice Age flute players played, and what it meant to them. [Unknown]