Ancient African Rock Painting Brought to Life Through Music

Archaeologists spend a lot of time examining the remains of distant pasts, which includes the study of rock paintings, write Neil Rusch and Sarah Wurz for The Conversation.

A new study has revealed that a rock painting from the Cederberg Mountains in South Africa's Western Cape Province. The human figures in this painting have previously been interpreted as healers holding fly-whisks and doing a trance dance. Fly-whisks were an important accessory for the dance because they were thought to keep arrows of sickness at bay.

But results suggest that the fly-whisks are in fact musical instruments of a type known as a !goin !goin - a name that only exists in the now-extinct Xam language that was spoken by hunter-gatherers in central southern Africa. The !goin !goin is an aerophone; these instruments produce sound by creating vibrations in the air when they are spun around.

To reach this conclusion researchers combined digital image recovery techniques with instruments created from life-size templates based on their findings. The eight instruments were played in a Cape Town sound studio and the sounds were recorded.