Prehistoric flute in China
According to Nature, a group of Chinese archeologists found prehistoric flute have been found in China at Jiahu site in Henan, which was occupied between 7000 and 5700 BC during the Neolithic period. The flutes have 5 to 8 holes and one of them is still playable. These flutes are made almost 9000 years ago from hollowed bird bones.
The complex of developments in stone tool technology, food production and storage, and social organization that is often characterized as the "Neolithic Revolution" was in progress in China by at least the 6th millennium BC. Developments in the Chinese Neolithic were to establish some of the major cultural dimensions of the subsequent Bronze Age.
Although the precise nature of the paleoenvironment is still in dispute, temperatures in Neolithic China were probably some 4 to 7 F (2 to 4 C) warmer than they are today. Rainfall, although more abundant, may have been declining in quantity. The Tsinling Mountains in northwest China separated the two phytogeographical zones of North and South China, while the absence of such a mountain barrier farther east encouraged a more uniform environment and the freer movement of Neolithic peoples about the North China Plain. East China, particularly toward the south, may have been covered with thick vegetation, some deciduous forest, and scattered marsh. The Loess Plateau in the northwest is thought to have been drier and even semiarid, with some coniferous forest growing on the hills and with brush and open woodland in the valleys.
Flutes are wind instruments in which the sound is produced by a stream of air directed against a sharp edge, upon which the air breaks up into eddies that alternate regularly above and below the edge, setting into vibration the air enclosed in the flute. In vertical, end-vibrated flutes--such as the Balkan kaval, the Arabic nay, and panpipes--the player holds the pipe end to his mouth, directing his breath against the opposite edge. In China, South America, Africa, and elsewhere, a notch may be cut in the edge to facilitate sound generation (notched flutes). Vertical nose flutes are also found, especially in Oceania. In transverse, or cross, flutes (i.e., horizontally held and side blown), the stream of breath strikes the opposite rim of a lateral mouth hole. Vertical flutes such as the recorder, in which an internal flue or duct directs the air against a hole cut in the side of the instrument, are known as fipple, or whistle, flutes.