Were these calls used by hunters to attract birds? Or musical instruments involved in other occasions of life: ritual ceremonies, even festive evenings? Seven small flutes were found by a Frenchman in Israel. The lucky discoverer is called Laurent Davin. He is 33 years old and has worked for two years in the archeology laboratory of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
This Drôme, originally from the small village of Séderon (where his grandparents ran the local butcher’s shop for a long time), settled in Israel after completing a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne on the ornaments of the time of man. Natufian, as we call our distant ancestor who settled in the Middle East fifteen millennia ago. (The Natufians lived between Lebanon and the Sinai Desert on the Mediterranean coast and as far as the Euphrates inland).
What if this call had been used to tame raptors? We would be here in the presence of the oldest traces of falconry. As attractive as it is, this hypothesis remains unresolved. We can also consider that these flutes were used to hunt other species by scaring them. Another possibility would be instruments unrelated to hunting. “Many ethnic groups incorporate the sounds of nature into their musical compositions,” notes Laurent Davin, who is about to work for two years at the Israel Academy of Sciences. In any case, archaeologists will look differently at bird bones when they dig them up in the region.
*Laurent Davin’s study, published in Nature Scientific Reports with José-Miguel Tejero, from the University of Vienna, can be consulted here. To hear the sounds made by these little flutes, click on this video.