The Singing Neanderthals: the Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body, by Steven Mithen. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2005. ISBN 0-297-64317-7 hardback £20 & US$25.2; ix+374 pp.

Abstract

Why are humans musical? Why do people in all cultures sing or play instruments? Why do we appear to have specialized neurological apparatus for hearing and interpreting music as distinct from other sounds? And how does our musicality relate to language and to our evolutionary history?Anthropologists and archaeologists have paid little attention to the origin of music and musicality — far less than for either language or ‘art’. While art has been seen as an index of cognitive complexity and language as an essential tool of communication, music has suffered from our perception that it is an epiphenomenal ‘leisure activity’, and archaeologically inaccessible to boot. Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Steven Mithen; music is integral to human social life, he argues, and we can investigate its ancestry with the same rich range of analyses — neurological, physiological, ethnographic, linguistic, ethological and even archaeological — which have been deployed to study language. In The Singing Neanderthals Steven Mithen poses these questions and proposes a bold hypothesis to answer them. Mithen argues that musicality is a fundamental part of being human, that this capacity is of great antiquity, and that a holistic protolanguage of musical emotive expression predates language and was an essential precursor to it.This is an argument with implications which extend far beyond the mere origins of music itself into the very motives of human origins. Any argument of such range is bound to attract discussion and critique; we here present commentaries by archaeologists Clive Gamble and Iain Morley and linguists Alison Wray and Maggie Tallerman, along with Mithen's response to them. Whether right or wrong, Mithen has raised fascinating and important issues. And it adds a great deal of charm to the time-honoured, perhaps shopworn image of the Neanderthals shambling ineffectively through the pages of Pleistocene prehistory to imagine them humming, crooning or belting out a cappella harmonies as they went.

The evolution of vocal learning

“…Darwin [37] suggested that early progenitors of man used their voices primarily in singing during courtship, incorporating in their song imitations of natural sounds. More recent authors have adopted this suggestion of a musical protolanguage [36,38], and Fitch has argued that sexual selection would have been responsible for the elaboration of such a protolanguage [36]. If so, sexual selection for more elaborate vocalizations would explain the origin of vocal learning in hominids just as has been proposed for birds.…”

Improving the quality of meetings using music

“…"While the concept of music may vary, all cultures have song and dance, and make some form of internal repetition and variation in their musical utterances; they use rhythmic structures based on distinctions between note lengths and dynamic stresses" (Mithen, 2005, p.12 quoting Nettl, 1983. Much has been written about what are described as cultural and musical "universals", but are there actually such universals?…”

“…Both music and language have the quality of expressive phrasing (Mithen, 2005, p.24, quoting Brown, 2000. The cognitive demands of music may be fewer than those of language.…”

“…Apart from musical universals, it is now recognized that some emotions are also universal, and not only cultural constructs that are specific to particular societies (Mithen, 2005, p. 86, quoting Ekman, 1992. Emotions guide action in "bounded rationality" -situations of imperfect knowledge and multiple, conflicting goals.…”

Music and madness: neuropsychiatric aspects of music

“…6 Some support from these views comes from the work of Mithen, who has argued that spoken language and music evolved from a proto-language, a musi-language which evolved from primate calls used by the Neanderthals: it was emotional but without words as we know them. 7 The link between music and emotion seems to be accepted for all time. 8 Plato considered that music played in different modes would arouse different emotions, and as a generality most of us would agree on the emotional significance of any particular piece of music, whether it is happy or sad, for example.…”