Here’s a good cocktail party question: what is the world’s oldest known musical instrument? If you were to guess the drum—really, just a surface that can be pounded, ideally rhythmically, but not necessarily, as we all have discovered at one unfortunate time or another—you would actually be wrong. Recently, in a cave in Southern Germany, researchers have uncovered a set of flutes—yes, flutes (and, sorry, Zamfir, not pan flutes)—that have been carbon dated and found to be between 42,000 and 43,000 years old. (The previous record holder was another South German flute dating from about 35,000 years ago.) The flutes were carved out of bone and elephant tusks. (I wonder if they would discover more flutes in Alabama, because there the tusks are looser...ahem...) I should also point out that this was a good 42,000 to 43,000 years before Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk. From the BBC:

some researchers have argued that music may have been one of a suite of behaviours displayed by our species which helped give them an edge over the Neanderthals - who went extinct in most parts of Europe 30,000 years ago. Music could have played a role in the maintenance of larger social networks, which may have helped our species expand their territory at the expense of the more conservative Neanderthals.

Prehistoric social networks. Tens of thousands of years ago, our forebears wrote on cave walls. Today, we’re on Facebook...writing on each others’ Walls. We’ve come a long way, baby! Researchers use discoveries like cave artifacts to determine when early humans first appeared in various places around Europe—occasionally impelled to move due to climate change:

The researchers say the dating evidence from Geissenkloesterle suggests that modern humans entered the Upper Danube region before an extremely cold climatic phase at around 39,000-40,000 years ago. Previously, researchers had argued that modern humans initially migrated up the Danube immediately after this event. "Modern humans during [this] period were in central Europe at least 2,000-3,000 years before this climatic deterioration, when huge icebergs calved from ice sheets in the northern Atlantic and temperatures plummeted," said Prof Higham.