Archaeologists have found the world's oldest playable flute in China. It's a 9,000 year-old, 8,6 inch instrument in pristine condition that has seven holes and was made from a hollow bone of a bird, the red-crowned crane.

It is one of six flutes and 30 fragments recovered from the Jiahu, a remarkably rich but little-known archeological site in the Yellow River valley in Henan Province in central China. Radiocarbon dating shows the site was occupied for 1,300 years beginning around 7000 B.C., during the early Neolithic period in China.

A fragment of a 45,000 year-old flute was previously found in Slovenia but it could not be played.

Nine millennia after lips last touched it, the flute was played again and its tones analyzed. The seven holes produced a rough scale covering a modern octave. It is impossible to know what relationship, if any, the tones have to six- or seven-tone Chinese scales first documented 6,000 years later (the other intact flutes have five to eight holes, but are not playable because of their condition). But the fact that the playable flute had a carefully selected tone scale indicates that the Neolithic musicians may have been able to play more than single notes, but actual music.

While fragments of what appear to be flutes made from animal bones have been found at much older Neanderthal sites, the Chinese instruments are the oldest ones that have remained intact. They were discovered more than a decade ago, but are only now being described in the West in a paper in the journal Nature, the result of an unusual collaboration between the Chinese researchers and a scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.

The flutes are made from the bones of the red-crowned crane, a fact that could have significance in Chinese culture, said James C. Y. Watt, Brooke Russell Astor curator of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. He said there was a Chinese legend, first documented about 2,000 years ago, of people who could summon cranes by playing on the flute.

The flutes, found in some of the more than 300 graves uncovered at the site, almost certainly were used in rituals, said Frederick Lau, an ethnomusicologist and associate professor at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. They may have been used as bronze bells dating back 2,000 years were used, at temple fairs, burials and other ritualistic events.

The flutes are only the most remarkable artifacts from Jiahu, less than 5 percent of which has been excavated. More than 40 house foundations have been uncovered, as have 370 cellars and 9 pottery kilns.

Jiahu may turn out to be one of the most important sites for understanding the early underpinnings of Chinese society, when humans left the caves of the Stone Age and began practicing agriculture and establishing permanent settlements.

A short rendition of a Chinese folk song called the Chinese Small Cabbage, played on the ancient instrument can be heard on the web site of the science journal Nature.

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