Hans Zimmer's Team Built Bone Flutes and a 12-Foot Bass for the Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age Soundtrack
The soundtrack for Apple TV+'s Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age arrived on 21 August 2026, bringing with it one of the more unusual instrument lists in television scoring: a 60,000-year-old bear-bone flute, a 12-foot double bass that rumbles below the range of human hearing, and wind instruments fashioned to mimic the larynx of an extinct terror bird.
The score is the work of three composers — Hans Zimmer, Kara Talve and Anže Rozman — writing together at Bleeding Fingers Music, the collective Zimmer founded. All three have scored every installment of Prehistoric Planet since the series began. The BBC National Orchestra of Wales performs the 26-track album, now listed on Spotify and Apple Music. Variety confirmed the release.
For the Ice Age chapter, the composing team made a deliberate shift away from the sound of earlier seasons. The first two seasons of Prehistoric Planet saw Zimmer, Talve and Rozman build custom instruments — a Raptor Violin, a HadroCello, a Triceratone, and a bass they called the FatRex — from bones, fossils and dinosaur-skull replicas, blended with a traditional orchestra to evoke the Mesozoic Era. The Ice Age score, by contrast, is heavier and darker. The trio removed high flutes, violins and brass to strip the sound down to its low end.
The centrepiece of that low end is an octobass: a double bass so large the player has to stand on a stool to reach the strings. The instrument measures 12 feet tall and produces subsonic frequencies as low as 16 Hz — below what the human ear can register as a distinct pitch, but felt as a physical vibration. The team used it to give the woolly mammoth sequences their rumble.
For a human dimension, Rozman turned to one of archaeology's most debated artefacts. The Divje Babe flute is a cave-bear femur pierced with holes, discovered in 1995 at the Divje Babe archaeological site in Slovenia and widely thought to be a Paleolithic instrument — meaning it may be among the oldest musical instruments known. Rozman said the trio recorded a replica of the flute inside Postojna Cave in Slovenia, the same kind of limestone cavern where such instruments might have been played tens of thousands of years ago. He described the sound as eerie, and said it transports listeners back in time. Variety
The terror bird — phorusrhacids, a lineage of giant flightless predators — got its own sonic treatment. The composers based its sounds on a prototype modelled on the larynx of an extinct terror-bird species. The Triceratone, originally a wind instrument built for the earlier seasons, was repurposed to produce the guttural calls the bird would need.
Zimmer, Talve and Rozman are nominated in the Outstanding Music Composition for a Documentary/Nonfiction or Reality Program (Original Dramatic Score) Emmy category for Prehistoric Planet: Ice Age. Variety
The series itself premiered on Apple TV+ on 26 November 2025, produced by Jon Favreau and Michael Gunton, per Apple's press page and Zimmer's official website. The soundtrack release comes months after the series aired, timed to the Emmy voting window.
For fans of the composers' work, there is more on the horizon. Zimmer, Talve and Rozman are currently writing the original score for HBO's upcoming Harry Potter series. Variety
