Creationism in Crisis - That's Blown It! Bone Flutes from 8,000 Years Before Earth Was Created!

Creationism in Crisis

That's Blown It! Bone Flutes from 8,000 Years Before Earth Was Created!

The first prehistoric wind instruments discovered in the Levant | CNRS

This is beginning to look like another bad week for creationist frauds.

Close on the news that archaeologists have discovered how agriculturalists and pastoralists migrated into what is now Morocco, thousands of years before Earth was created by magic out of nothing, according to what they tell their dupes, comes news that a Franco-Israeli team have unearthed musical instruments that are some three time older than creationist fools are told Earth is.

The normal creationist tactic for coping with the cognitive dissonance the scientific evidence keeps on producing in their minds, is to:

• Ignore it and hope it'll go away if ignored for long enough.
• Dismiss it as a conspiracy - the scientists are lying because they want to turn you away from God (Oops! gave away the fact that creationism is religion, not science, there, but needs must...!)
• Claim the dating methods are wrong so the flutes must be much younger.
• Claim that 'historical science' is all speculation because no-one was there to see it - aka. the "My great grandparents never had sex. Prove me wrong!", argument.
• Assert that the facts must be wrong because they don't agree with the Bible narrative, which must be true because it says it is in the Bible.
• Shout at it and stamp their foot to make the facts behave and comply with their requirements.

Sadly for creationists though, none of those tactics have worked, and the evidence is still that people in the Middle East were making musical instruments 12,000 years ago. Even more embarrassingly for creationists who believe humans have always believed in their god and are all descended from a couple it created without ancestors and from a handful of related survivors of a genocidal flood a few thousand years ago, there is evidence that these Bronze Age people, like the Egyptian, Indians and Chinese (to name but a few) had a religion that appears to have had nothing to do with the religion of the Bible. The flutes may have had some ceremonial role in that early religion.

To add insult to injury, this discovery was made in the part of the world where creationists like to image the tales in the Bible were set and yet the Bible has no mention of people having a religion involving birds and rituals involving bone flutes. It's exactly like the authors knew nothing of their own history.

The findings are described in a news release from Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS):

Although the prehistoric site of Eynan-Mallaha in northern Israel has been thoroughly examined since 1955, it still holds some surprises for scientists. Seven prehistoric wind instruments known as flutes, recently identified by a Franco-Israeli team¹ , are the subject of an article published on 9 June in Nature Scientific Reports. The discovery of these 12,000-year-old aerophones is extremely rare – in fact, they are the first to be discovered in the Near East. The “flutes”, made from the bones of a small waterfowl, produce a sound similar to certain birds of prey (Eurasian sparrowhawk and common kestrel) when air is blown into them. The choice of bones used to make these instruments was no accident – larger birds, with bigger bones that produce deeper sounds, have also been found at the site. The Natufians, the Near Eastern civilisation that occupied this village between 13,000 and 9,700 BC, deliberately selected smaller bones in order to obtain the high-pitched sound needed to imitate these particular raptors. The instruments may have been used for hunting, music or to communicate with the birds themselves. Indeed, it is clear that the Natufians attributed birds with a special symbolic value, as attested by the many ornaments made of talons found at Eynan-Mallaha. The village, located on the shores of Lake Hula, was home to this civilisation throughout its 3,000 years of existence. It is therefore of vital importance in revealing the practices and habits of a culture at the crossroads between mobile and sedentary lifestyles, and the transition from a predatory economy to agriculture. This work² was supported by the Fyssen Fondation and the ministère des Affaires étrangères.

Bone aerophones from Eynan-Mallaha, level Ib (Final Natufian). 1: EM99 7201; 2: EM96 5564; 3: EM97 6182; 4: EM99 7414; 5: EM04 9363; 6: EM98 6581; 7: EM98 7026 with details of the 10 worked areas: 7c/7d/7e/7i being finger-holes (in green), 7a/7b/7f./7 h being shallow notches (in blue), 7 g the mouthpiece with two perforations (7g1 and 7g2) and a residue of colouring material (7g3), 7j the distal end.

(CAD and photos L.D.).
Laurent Davin, José-Miguel Tejero, Tal Simmons, et. al, (2023)

(A) Map of the distribution of Late/Final Natufian sites in the Levant; (B) Hydrographic Map of the Hula Basin

(CAD A.B. and H.K.).
Laurent Davin, José-Miguel Tejero, Tal Simmons, et. al, (2023)

Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

The team's findings are published, open access, in the journal Scientific Reports:

Abstract

Direct evidence for Palaeolithic sound-making instruments is relatively rare, with only a few examples recorded from Upper Palaeolithic contexts, particularly in European cultures. However, theoretical considerations suggest that such artefacts have existed elsewhere in the world. Nevertheless, evidence for sound production is tenuous in the prehistoric archaeological record of the Levant, the study of music and its evolution being sparsely explored. Here we report new evidence for Palaeolithic sound-making instruments from the Levant with the discovery of seven aerophones made of perforated bird bones in the Final Natufian site of Eynan-Mallaha, Northern Israel. Through technological, use-wear, taphonomic, experimental and acoustical analyses, we demonstrate that these objects were intentionally manufactured more than 12,000 years ago to produce a range of sounds similar to raptor calls and whose purposes could be at the crossroads of communication, attracting hunting prey and music-making. Although similar aerophones are documented in later archaeological cultures, such artificial bird sounds were yet to be reported from Palaeolithic context. Therefore, the discovery from Eynan-Mallaha contributes new evidence for a distinctive sound-making instrument in the Palaeolithic. Through a combined multidisciplinary approach, our study provides important new data regarding the antiquity and development of the variety of sound-making instruments in the Palaeolithic at large and particularly at the dawn of the Neolithic in the Levant.

Davin, L., Tejero, JM., Simmons, T. et al.
Bone aerophones from Eynan-Mallaha (Israel) indicate imitation of raptor calls by the last hunter-gatherers in the Levant.
Sci Rep 13, 8709 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-35700-9

Copyright: © 2023 The authors.
Published by Springer Nature Ltd. Open access.
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)>

Once again, quite casually and without intent, scientists refute creationism. Not only is Earth far older than creationists like to imagine but the earlier human inhabitants knew nothing of creationism's putative creator god or the tales surrounding its supposed creation of humans followed by creationist's favourite genocide.

And of course, their religion is a mystery to us because, as with all religions, there is no factual basis for it so nothing on to which to found a rediscovery. We know nothing of their gods or why it was important to have the right flutes in the right rituals to ensure they continued doing whatever they were believed to do or not do whatever they were believed to be capable of doing if not kept quiescent and appeased. The whole thing was founded on fantasy and delusion and their gods, like all gods, disappeared without trace when their last believer died.

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