After 18,000 years of silence, an ancient musical instrument played its first notes. The last time anyone heard a sound from the conch shell trumpet, thick sheets of ice still covered most of Europe.

Archaeologists have modeled the auditory range of conch-shell trumpets in the 9th–11th century US Southwest, proposing that the sound was key in the structuring of pre-Columbian Pueblo communities. At ...

Music from the large conch probably hadn’t been heard by human ears for 17,000 years. By Katherine Kornei In 1931, researchers working in southern France unearthed a large seashell at the entrance to ...

Scientists analyzing a conch shell believed to be the oldest wind instrument of its type in the world have released a recording of what it would have sounded like. The shell was largely overlooked ...

Some 18,000 years ago, in a cave in what we now call France, a human being left behind something precious: a conch shell. It was not just any conch shell. Its tip had been lopped off—unlikely by ...

Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces from Imperial College London. Alfredo has a PhD in Astrophysics and a Master's in Quantum Fields and ...

Archaeologists working in northeastern Spain say a cache of conch shells was not just decorative debris from ancient shorelines but a set of carefully modified instruments that once filled Neolithic ...

The seashell has been collecting dust on a museum shelf in Toulouse for the past 80 years, and before that, it had spent all of recorded history, plus a few millennia, on the floor of a cave in the ...

Jackson Ryan was CNET's science editor, and a multiple award-winning one at that. Earlier, he'd been a scientist, but he realized he wasn't very happy sitting at a lab bench all day. Science writing, ...