After 18,000 years of silence, an ancient musical instrument played its first notes. The last time anyone heard a sound from the conch shell trumpet, thick sheets of ice still covered most of Europe.

The team noted engravings beneath some of the conch’s red dots too. “The [shell’s] pigment was analyzed and its chemical composition is very similar to one of the wall paintings,” Walter says.

It has a small, narrow hole drilled into the point of the shell called the apex, and is decorated with fingerprint-shaped ochre red markings. “We are pretty sure that this shell was transformed ...

WASHINGTON — A large conch shell overlooked in a museum for decades is now thought to be the oldest known seashell instrument — and it still works, producing a deep, plaintive bleat, like a ...

The Marsoulas conch shell Carole Fritz et al. 2021. Conch shells have been used as sacred objects or musical instruments across history, with the authors suggesting the previously oldest known ...

An ancient conch shell that was usual as a musical instrument has been played for the first time in 17,000 years. BBC Homepage. ... as well as using a red pigment to decorate it, ...