Science ScienceAlert Startling Sounds From 6,000-Year-Old Shells Hint at Their Ancient Use

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Oddly shaped conch shells found at Neolithic archaeological sites dating back 6,000 years could have served as technology for producing an extremely loud noise, scientists have discovered.

The tests were simple – picking up the shells and blowing into them – but the results were startling: a deafening TOOOOOOT recorded at up to 111.5 decibels. That’s about as loud as a car horn or chainsaw.

This creative experimentation by archaeologists Miquel López-Garcia and Margarita Díaz-Andreu of the University of Barcelona in Spain suggests that the people who lived at the Catalonia sites where the shells were found may have used them as a long-distance signalling tool.

Related: Momentous Discovery Shows Neanderthals Could Produce Human-Like Speech

The shells of large sea snails – conch shells – have been found at many archaeological sites, leading to speculation that they may have served some function, musical or otherwise.

Experiments to produce sound using these ancient shells have shown that our ancestors may have used them as horns, with the oldest known such object dating back 17,000 years.

Many shells have been found at sites across Catalonia, in northeastern Spain, dating to the late 5th and early 4th millennia BCE. Archaeologists believe these shells may, too, have been used to produce sound, but little investigation has been conducted for these specific objects.

López-Garcia and Díaz-Andreu decided to change that.

“It was known that several Charonia lampas shells had been discovered within a relatively small area of Catalonia – specifically, in the lower course of the Llobregat River and the pre-coastal depression of the Penedès region, to the east of the city of Barcelona,” Díaz-Andreu says.

“They had their apexes removed, leading some researchers to suggest they may have served as musical instruments.”

The duo’s work involved making a detailed physical study of 12 conch shells collected from five archaeological sites.

Then, López-Garcia, who also plays the trumpet professionally, had a go at carefully blowing into some of them to try to produce a sound.

All 12 of the shells had had their apex removed – the very tippy-top whorl of the spiral structure. This is necessary if a shell is going to be used as a horn; it creates a hole through which the trumpeter can blow.

Several of the shells also had biological marks left by other creatures, such as worms and carnivorous mollusks.

This is crucial: It suggests that humans collected the shells after the inhabitants had already died, and the shells were empty.

In other words, the shell itself was the desirable artifact, not the snail inside, which could be used as a possible food source.

Of the 12 shells, only eight were intact enough to try blowing into. Two of those also had small holes that the researchers thought may have been deliberately made to help the player modify the sound’s tone.

López-Garcia was able to get sound out of all eight shells, hitting volumes greater than 100 decibels for seven of them – about the loudness of a motorcycle.

He also produced up to three distinct pitches in two of the shells – although the higher the note, the less stable the sound.

Using other trumpet-playing techniques, such as changing the sound with a hand and altering pitch with the mouth, also destabilized the sound.

Covering up the holes on the two shells that had them had no effect, either, indicating that the holes were natural, not deliberately bored to change the sound of the conch.

Put together, these clues suggest that while the conch shells could produce a few musical notes, their sheer volume makes long-distance communication the far more plausible primary use, by Neolithic farmers whose activities likely covered large areas.

“The shell trumpets are capable of producing high-intensity sounds and would have been highly effective for long-distance communication,” López-Garcia says.

“However, they are also capable of producing melodies through pitch modulation, so the possibility that these shells were also used as musical instruments with an expressive intention cannot be ruled out.”

Who knows? Maybe their makers were even trying to treat sleep apnea.

The research has been published in Antiquity.

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