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 ...

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 ...

Artist's rendering of a prehistoric human playing the ancient conch instrument G. Tosello A team of researchers was studying the archaeological inventory of the Natural History Museum of Toulouse in ...

A horn made from a conch shell over 17,000 years ago has blasted out musical notes for the first time in millennia. Archaeologists originally found the seashell in 1931, in a French cave that contains ...

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 ...

Conch-shell trumpets discovered in Neolithic settlements and mines in Catalonia make tone similar to french horn, says lead researcher As a child, Miquel López García was fascinated by the conch shell ...

After 18,000 years of silence, an ancient musical instrument played its first notes. The last time anyone heard a sound from the conch shell trumpet, thick sheets of ice still covered most of Europe.

Miquel López-García is an archaeologist. He’s also a professional trumpeter, performing in many styles from jazz and funk to salsa and Catalan folk music. And as a child, he told The Guardian, he ...