A thin piece of wood. A length of cord. Swung overhead in a circle, it fills the night air with a deep, pulsing roar that carries for miles. Sometime around 18,000 B.C.E. — and possibly earlier — someone in what is now Ukraine spun one of these devices for the first time. Or perhaps they were simply the first whose work survived. Either way, the bullroarer may be the oldest known human-made sound instrument, and its story reaches every continent on Earth.
What the evidence shows
- Bullroarer invention: Archaeological finds in present-day Ukraine suggest the bullroarer dates to approximately 18,000 B.C.E., placing its origins in the Upper Paleolithic — though the attribution carries some scholarly uncertainty and the supporting citation remains unverified in the primary literature.
- Paleolithic music: The device consists of a weighted airfoil — a thin, rectangular slat of wood roughly 15 to 60 centimeters long — attached to a cord and swung in a circle, generating a vibrating roar through aerodynamic spin.
- Global distribution: Anthropologist Michael Boyd documents bullroarer finds across Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Australia, making it one of the most widely distributed ritual and communication technologies in human prehistory.
How it actually works
The physics behind the bullroarer are elegant. When the cord is given a slight initial twist and the slat is swung in a circle, centrifugal force keeps it spinning on its own axis. The cord winds and unwinds alternately, and the wooden airfoil rotates in both directions, producing a characteristic vibrato roar.
That roar is not random noise. By adjusting the length of the cord, the speed of the swing, and the plane of rotation — horizontal or vertical — a skilled user can modulate the sound significantly. The low-frequency component travels extraordinary distances, clearly audible over many miles on a quiet night. This made the bullroarer one of the first long-range communication tools in human history, a kind of acoustic telegraph tens of thousands of years before writing.
A technology that crossed every ocean
What makes the bullroarer genuinely remarkable is not its simplicity — it is its universality. Cultures that had no contact with one another independently developed the same device, the same technique, and often the same sacred significance.
Among Aboriginal Australians, the bullroarer — known in some languages as the turndun — holds some of the deepest ceremonial significance of any object in human culture. In southeastern Australia, its sound is understood to be the voice of Daramulan, a creator figure. The instrument is considered sacred men’s business by most Aboriginal groups, and its sounds were historically restricted from women, children, uninitiated men, and outsiders. The band Midnight Oil, recording their 1987 album Diesel and Dust, used an imitation bullroarer specifically to avoid appropriating something sacred.
The Māori pūrerehua — made from wood, stone, or bone — was used for healing and calling rain. The Dogon people of West Africa use bullroarers to announce ceremonies during the Sigui festival, which unfolds over seven years every 60 years. In Ancient Greece, the instrument appeared in the mysteries of Cybele, where it was called a rhombos — a word that also gave us the geometric term “rhombus” because of the slat’s typical shape. Inland Pomo tribes of California used them in Thunder ceremonies. Shamans of the Amazon basin spun them in ritual across Tupi, Kamayurá, and Bororo cultures. In parts of Scotland, the bullroarer was called a “thunder-spell” and was believed to protect against lightning strikes.
Scandinavian Stone Age peoples used them too. In 1991, archaeologists in Tuv, northern Norway, found a 6.4-centimeter piece of slate — a brummer — approximately 5,000 years old.
Lasting impact
The bullroarer represents something profound in the human record: a convergent invention. Across cultures separated by oceans and tens of thousands of years, human beings arrived at the same solution to the same problems — how to make ceremony feel sacred, how to send sound across distance, how to give shape to something as large and invisible as a spiritual force.
That convergence matters. It suggests that when humans face similar conditions and similar needs — ritual, communication, awe — they tend to find similar answers. The bullroarer is not just a piece of wood on a string. It is evidence that certain human impulses are deep and shared.
The instrument also quietly prefigures aeroacoustic principles that engineers would not formally describe until the 20th century. Its airfoil shape, its vibrating rotation, and its ability to encode information through modulation all appear in this ancient technology long before they appeared in textbooks. It has been included in orchestral compositions, most notably John Antill’s ballet Corroboree in 1946 C.E., and in Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn concerts in London in 2014 C.E.
Blindspots and limits
The 18,000 B.C.E. date for the Ukrainian find is widely repeated but rests on a single unverified citation that has not been traced to a peer-reviewed primary source in available literature — a reminder that even the oldest stories can carry unsourced footnotes. It is also worth noting that the bullroarer’s sacred role in many Indigenous traditions has historically been violated by outsiders who recorded, displayed, or reproduced the instrument and its sounds without consent — a pattern that has caused genuine harm to living communities whose relationship with the object remains active and ceremonially protected.
The archaeological record almost certainly underrepresents how widespread the bullroarer was. Organic materials rarely survive 18,000 years. The finds we have are not the whole story — they are simply the ones that lasted.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Bullroarer
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights recognition expands to 160 million hectares ahead of COP30
- Ghana establishes new marine protected area at Cape Three Points
- The Good News for Humankind archive on prehistory
About this article
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