What Was the First Musical Instrument?
Music seems to be an intrinsic part of the human experience — we all love some form of music, whatever genre it is. People have been using instruments for thousands of years, but where did it all begin?
When people first began to make music, they used their own bodies, so music was limited to singing, clapping, and whatever other sounds they could make. In that way, the first instrument was something humans didn’t even invent — ourselves.
Some historians don’t think it’s possible to determine the invention of instruments. Ancient people made them from natural materials which have been lost to time. What a musical instrument even is can actually be hard to define. Dolly Parton famously used her acrylic nails as an instrument in her song “9 to 5”.
According to National Geographic, the oldest instrument was a flute found in a cave in the south of Germany. It was made 40,000 years ago from the bone of a vulture. Music actually gave us an advantage over the Neanderthals because it helped us to better communicate and form social bonds.
