Originally presumed to be nothing more than a drinking vessel, the conch shell sat for over 80 years in the Natural History Museum of Toulouse.

Since 2016, a team has been reanalysing the conch shell using modern imaging technology. They concluded that the shell had been deliberately chipped and punctured to turn it into a musical instrument. It’s an extremely rare example of a “seashell horn” from the Paleolithic period, the team concluded. And it still works — a musician from the University of Toulouse recently managed to play a few different notes on the 17,000-year-old shell.

News on the discovery can be read in English on the Guardian website and in the New York Times, in French on the Museum's website blog, or in Dutch on scientias.nl and you can listen to the sounds it produces on all platforms!