Divje Babe Flute - Site and Similar Findings in Slovenia

Site and Similar Findings in Slovenia

Divje Babe is the oldest known archaeological site in Slovenia. The site is the location of a horizontal cave, 45 metres (148 ft) long and up to 15 metres (49 ft) wide. It is located 230m above the Idrijca River, near Cerkno, and is accessible to visitors. Researchers working at this site have uncovered more than 600 archaeological finds in at least ten levels, including 20 hearths and the skeletal remains of cave bears, and have studied climate change during the pleistocene. According to the museum, the presumed flute has been associated with the "end of the middle Pleistocene" and the time of Neanderthals, about 55,000 years ago.

This is not the only such site in Slovenia. In the 1920s and 1930s, the archeologist Srečko Brodar discovered tens of bones with holes in another site, Potok Cave (Slovene: Potočka zijalka) in the Eastern Karavanke, but almost all of them were destroyed during Italian occupation of Ljubljana in World War II. The best known of them, still preserved, is a mandible of a cave bear with three holes in the mandibular canal.

Since World War II, specimens have also been found in Mokrica Cave (Slovene: Mokriška jama), Betal Rock Shelter (Betalov spodmol), and elsewhere. These bones are preserved today at the National History Museum of Slovenia in Ljubljana, the capital. According to the archeologist, who discovered many of them, Mitja Brodar, bones with holes were never found in the Western Europe, and they have been dated only to the end of the Mousterian and the beginning of the Aurignacian. Such bones were discovered also elsewhere in Central Europe, but in a much lower number, and it is unlikely that cave bears would make such holes only in Central Europe and only in a specific period. That these bones are still not recognised by international research community, Mitja Brodar attributes to the fact that most of the bones were found on the territory of France and the Paleolithic is still considered to be the French domain, although not a single bone with holes have been found there. The only one ever discovered bone point with a hole has been discovered in Potok Cave. According to Brodar, such holes are an element of Central European Aurignacian. They have been ascribed to the Cro-Magnon, modern human. According to Brodar, the Divje Babe flute is a product of modern human as well, but this has been disputed by other Slovene scholars.