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On Feb. 10, 1763, the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years' War between Britain and Spain and also the French and Indian War, with France ceding Quebec to Great Britain. ....
Everyone who lives or vacations near the ocean has gone on an early morning beach walk to collect shells and, thinking they have found a perfectly intact specimen, bent over and plucked it from the sand, only to find the top broken off, the bottom missing, or a crack in the side. In the case of this sea snail shell from Marsoulas Cave in France’s Pyrenees Mountains the largest shell ever found in a European prehistoric context what might first be perceived as damage was actually the product of precision artistry. Many millennia ago, a member of the Paleolithic Magdalenian culture made a musical instrument from the shell, creating what is now the oldest known shell wind instrument in the world. ....
Credit: Fritz et al., doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abe9510 Recordings of this ancient conch shell transformed into a horn provide a time capsule into what sounds it was able to emit, tones that turned out to be in close proximity to the musical notes C, D and C sharp. These sonorous notes were extracted by a musicologist recruited by the researchers, who used a modern metal mouthpiece and blew into the shell’s customized opening. “I needed a lot of air to maintain the sound,” said Jean-Michel Court, who performed the demonstration. According to a new open-access study published last week in Science Advances, the remarkable shell is a large specimen of C. lampas, a mollusk heralding from the North-East Atlantic and the North Sea. Today, it can be found in Ireland and France (Brittany, Pas-de-Calais) at its northern borders. Although rare, it still lives in the Bay of Biscay and Basque and Asturian coasts of Spain. ....