Hi, questions about early humans are worth x-posting to our sister sub /r/AskAnthropology. I recall having seen a few questions on music there, so take a look

This really falls into the realm of prehistory or archeology rather than history. The oldest undisputed instrument, as far as I'm aware is still the Hohle Fels cave bone flute found in the southern German alpine region. It's made from vulture bone and is around 35,000 years old which places it squarely in the middle of the upper paleolithic.

The reason I say undisputed is that an amusing misinterpretation happened with the Divje Babe flute found in Slovenija and dated to Neanderthal culture about 55,000 years ago. Recent studies seem to show it might just be a bone that was chewed by Hyenas.

I think its safe to say that humans have been fascinated by sound production throughout most of their existence, since most other animals utilize it in some form or another. The question becomes when did sound production, by voice or tool, cross that blurry defining line between necessary communication and aesthetic leisure activity.

One of the challenges answering this question is that, barring unusual good luck, music often doesn't survive archaeologically. /u/The_Dead_See has mentioned our oldest (as far as I know) surviving musical instruments, but it's much harder to say whether early humans sang or played instruments made from something less durable than bone (wood and rawhide rarely last thousands of years in the ground - bone, too, for that matter is destroyed pretty quickly in many kinds of soil).

That said, Margarita Diaz-Andreu has been doing some really interesting collaborative research at several paleolithic rock art sites in Spain, measuring the accoustics of the canyons where the art is carved. In many cases, rock art is carved in spaces with especially good acoustics for musical performance - ie, places where music would sound best. Even though we don't have any surviving musical instruments associated with these particular sites, some kind of music was almost certainly part of whatever social practices this art was made for (or during).

I know a few other people who are researching soundscapes right now, and suspect that we'll learn that music played an important role in many prehistoric sites whose auditory history was previously invisible.

I wouldn't be surprised if these auditory spaces trace back very far into prehistory - music is a fundamental part of human experience.