SCIENCE FILE : Science in Brief : A 9,000-Year-Old Flute Found in China Still Carries a Tune

Archeologists in China have found what is believed to be the world’s oldest musical instrument that still works--a 9,000-year-old flute carved from the wing bone of a crane. When scientists from the United States and China blew gently through the mottled brown instrument’s mouthpiece and fingered its holes, they produced tones that were familiar to the modern ear, they report in today’s Nature.

The flute was one of several instruments to be uncovered in Jiahu, an excavation site of Stone Age artifacts in China’s Yellow River Valley. “It’s a reedy, pleasant sound, a little thin, like a recorder,” said Garman Harbottle, a nuclear scientist who specializes in radiocarbon dating at Brookhaven National Laboratory on New York’s Long Island.

A folk tune recorded on the flute can be heard at www.nature.com.

Compiled by Times medical writer Thomas H. Maugh II