The sound of the oldest musical instrument resembles greatly of a pan flute. It is a flute indeed, made out of bone, dated back 35,000 years ago during the colonising of Europe. Three of these artefacts were unearthed in the Hohle Fels cavern, south-west of Germany.

This discovery have proven that:

Music could have contributed
to the maintenance of larger
social networks, and thereby perhaps have helped facilitate
the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans relative to a culturally more conservative and demographically more isolated Neanderthal populations…

Source: BBC News