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 foghorn from the ...

Ancient Europeans made a horn out of a large seashell and blew musical notes out of it roughly 18,000 years ago, a new study suggests. While it’s not known how ancient people used the shell horn, ...

For the first time in more than 17,000 years, three mellifluous musical notes - close in tone to C, D, and C sharp - have reverberated from a conch shell modified to serve as a wind instrument. The ...

Archaeologists working in northeastern Spain say a cache of conch shells was not just decorative debris from ancient shorelines but a set of carefully modified instruments that once filled Neolithic ...

The seashell has been collecting dust on a museum shelf in Toulouse for the past 80 years, and before that, it had spent all of recorded history, plus a few millennia, on the floor of a cave in the ...

A conch shell found in a cave used by the Magdalenian people of the late Upper Palaeolithic was originally thought to be a cup, but a new analysis suggests they used it as a kind of horn. That would ...

This combination of photos provided by researcher Carole Fritz in February 2021 shows two sides of a 12-inch (31 cm) conch shell discovered in a French cave with prehistoric wall paintings in 1931.

For the first time in more than 17,000 years, three musical notes have reverberated from an ancient conch shell modified to serve as a wind instrument. Archaeologists say the specimen is the oldest ...