Musician cracked the code of a 50,000-year-old artifact — and played music that echoed through time

In a limestone cave above the Idrijca River in Slovenia, archaeologists unearthed a charred fragment of bear bone nearly three decades ago. It was small and smooth, with four evenly spaced holes drilled across its body. From the very start, the excavation team had a bold theory. As per Ivan Turk, the archaeologist who led the excavation, it was a flute, and not just any flute — possibly the oldest known musical instrument ever found, made by Neanderthals over 50,000 years ago.

The artifact, known as the Divje Babe flute, named after the cave where it was discovered, has been the center of debate in paleoarchaeology for more than 25 years. Some researchers champion it as revolutionary evidence of Neanderthal musical culture. Others argue it is nothing more than a juvenile cave bear’s femur, punctured by Ice Age hyenas during scavenging. But recent scientific work has added fresh weight to the musical hypothesis. In a 2024 peer-reviewed study published in Quaternary Science Reviews, researchers used high-resolution 3D X-ray microtomography to reanalyze the "flute’s" surface.

They found that at least one of the holes shows signs of shaping before the bone fractured, and that the end of the bone bears a beveled rim likely created intentionally. These features, the authors argue, are incompatible with carnivore damage and suggest deliberate modification by Neanderthals. Years after its discovery, a Slovenian musician decided to find out what it could sound like. Ljuben Dimkaroski, a trumpet player with the Ljubljana Opera Orchestra, received a precise clay replica of the Divje Babe flute. At first, he struggled to play it, but eventually, through trial and error, and what he described as a dream, he figured it out.

He even included animal mimicry and improvisation to demonstrate the expressive range of the replica. "The Mousterian musical instrument offers a unique insight into the Neanderthals’ symbolic behaviour and their cognitive abilities," wrote Turk and Dimkaroski in a joint academic paper, as per Zme Science. Recently, his daughter, Katinka Dimkaroski, also played the instrument on a BBC documentary about the artifact. But skepticism has never truly disappeared. In 2015, German paleobiologist Cajus Diedrich examined bone damage patterns at 15 European cave sites and concluded that the holes in the so-called flute were consistent with hyena bite marks, not deliberate human craftsmanship.

However, supporters of the flute hypothesis strongly disagree. "These three notes on the Neanderthal bone flute are inescapably diatonic," Musicologist Bob Fink wrote in a 2015 essay, adding that they matched do, re, mi, fa, a sign, he believed, of cognitive complexity. The artifact is now housed at the National Museum of Slovenia, where the official plaque continues to describe it as the oldest known musical instrument. It reads: "The flute from Divje babe testifies to the fact that Neanderthals were capable of such an abstract and uniquely human activity as creating music."

That question, whether Neanderthals made music, is what keeps this debate alive. For decades, they were portrayed as primitive, slow-witted, and unsophisticated. But recent archaeological finds have begun to dismantle that view. Fernando Muñiz, a crystallography professor at the University of Seville, put it that they were not "the brutalized humans of popular imagination," as per Sci Tech Daily. Neanderthals also buried their dead, collected black feathers from birds, possibly for adornment, and may have painted their bodies with ochre pigments. Still, no clear musical tradition has emerged. "It’s possible," said Nowell, "but no evidence of instruments or musical behavior has yet been found."