The oldest man-made musical instrument, a 35,000-year-old carved bird-bone flute, has been unearthed in a German cave.

Archaeologists assembled the flute from 12 pieces of griffon vulture bone scattered in a small plot of the Hohle Fels cave.

Together, the pieces comprise a 8.6-inch instrument with five holes and a notched end.

"It's unambiguously the oldest instrument in the world," University of Tuebingen archaeologist Nicholas Conard said as his findings were published today by the journal Nature.

The Hohle Fels flute is more complete and appears slightly older than bone and ivory fragments from seven other flutes recovered in southern German caves and documented by Dr Conard and his colleagues in recent years.

Another flute excavated in Austria is believed to be 19,000 years old, and a group of 22 flutes found in the French Pyrenees has been dated at up to 30,000 years ago.

Dr Conard's team excavated the flute in September 2008, the same month they recovered six ivory fragments from the Hohle Fels cave that form a female figurine they believe is the oldest known sculpture of the human form.

Together, the flute and the figure - found in the same layer of sediment - suggest that modern humans had established an advanced culture in Europe 35,000 years ago, said Wil Roebroeks, an archaeologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

He said it was difficult to tell how socially advanced these people were. But the physical trappings of their lives - including musical instruments, personal decorations and figurative art - match the objects we associate with modern human behaviour.

"It shows that from the moment that modern humans enter Europe ... it is as modern in terms of material culture as it can get," he said, agreeing with Dr Conard's assertion that the flute appears to be the earliest known musical instrument in the world.

Neanderthals also lived in Europe around the time the flute and sculpture were made, and frequented the Hohle Fels cave. Both scientists believe, however, that layered deposits left by both species over thousands of years suggest the artefacts were crafted by early modern humans.

"The material record is so completely different from what happened in these hundreds of thousands of years before with the Neanderthals," Dr Roebroeks said. "I would put my money on modern humans having created and played these flutes."

In 1995, archaeologist Ivan Turk excavated a bear bone artefact from a cave in Slovenia, known as the Divje Babe flute, that he has dated at around 43,000 years ago and suggested was made by Neanderthals.

But other archaeologists have challenged that theory, suggesting instead that the twin holes on the 4.3-inch-long bone were made by a carnivore's bite.

Belfast Telegraph