Human evolution: Oldest hand-crafted flute so far is 35,000 years old

The pieces of the ancient flute

comprise a 22-centimetre instrument with five holes and a notched end. Conard said the flute is 35,000 years old.

“It’s unambiguously the oldest instrument in the world,” said Conard. His findings were published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.

Other archeologists agreed with Conard’s assessment.

Well, that's reassuring.

The Hohle Fels flute is more complete and appears slightly older than bone and ivory fragments from seven other flutes recovered in southern German caves and documented by Conard and his colleagues in recent years.

Now, here's the interesting part:

Roebroeks said it’s difficult to say how cognitively and socially advanced these people were. But the physical trappings of their lives — including musical instruments, personal decorations and figurative art — match the objects we associate with modern human behaviour, he said.

“It shows that from the moment that modern humans enter Europe ... it is as modern in terms of material culture as it can get,” Roebroeks said.

That's the thing about the evolution of human culture. It never actually seems to happen. Someone just makes a flute and starts playing it, and soon every tribe has a flute.

A bit like the history of mathematics, I suppose. Someone just invents an idea like the Pythagorean theorem or zero, and everyone just picks up from there.

Do you taste what you see? What you remember? What you think you ought to?

We sometimes hear it said that human beings are far less sensitive than animals to smell and taste (the two senses being linked somewhat). One complexity is that cultural and personal ideas about what we are tasting play a major role in how we respond. In "Science: Could martinis be the secret of Bond's success?" (Telegraph, May 20, 2008), Roger Highfield offers some examples,

The appearance of a drink can also affect how happy we are with it: our brains make a pleasant association between the colours of ripening fruit and increased sugar content.

"Such colours, particularly bright reds, are especially powerful visual cues," says Prof Spence. "When incorporated into a drink, they can dramatically change the perceived flavour, as well as increasing the perceived sweetness by as much as 12 per cent."

French researchers tested this by using an odourless dye to colour white wine red. The wine tasters who tried the result used typical red wine descriptors, suggesting that its colour played a significant role in how they thought of it. "In cocktails, I'll look at how the very same colour can lead different people to think of, and therefore taste, very different flavours," says Prof Spence.

So did James Bond, world's best known secret agent, ace the cocktails? Apparently yes, and to celebrate the centenary of Bond novelist Ian Fleming's birth, Professor Charles Spence and Dr Andrea Sella will lecture on the proper way to prepare a cocktail he would love at the Cheltenham Science Festival in June. All for the good of science, of course.

Didn't you hear what I said? All for the good of ... okay, okay, it sounds to me like a good ol' bash too. Won't be quite the same without Fleming and Bond though.