The Biological Roots of Music and Dance

Hagen, Edward H.

doi:10.1007/s12110-022-09429-9

Cited by 10 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 92 publications

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“…Our Pleistocene ancestors had to protect themselves from both predators (Hagen, 2022) and potentially dangerous congeners (Kenrick & Lundberg-Kenrick, 2022) and our minds still bear the imprints of these evolutionary pressures. Nights are periods of particular vulnerability for most animals, including humans (Wichlinski, 2022).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Good Night, Sleep Tight”: Do we have an “Evolutionary Preference” for Placing Beds in Sleeping Rooms? A Replication and Extension of Spörrle and Stich (2010)

Bonin,

Thiebaut,

Didierjean

et al. 2023

Evolutionary Psychological Science

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HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Good Night, Sleep Tight”: Do we have an “Evolutionary Preference” for Placing Beds in Sleeping Rooms? A Replication and Extension of Spörrle and Stich (2010)

Bonin,

Thiebaut,

Didierjean

et al. 2023

Evolutionary Psychological Science

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“…In addition, we continued testing the credible signaling hypothesis by investigating the role of music in the protection against predators (Hagen, 2022). To test our predation deterrence hypothesis, the interaction between group size and distance from the village was selected as the proxy for predation risk.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another argument under the credible signaling hypothesis posits that music originated as a strategy along with the use of masks, body painting, and clothes to enable a group to intimidate and deter threats, such as predators (Jordania, 2011;Hagen, 2022). Singing in large numbers is shown to have a positive effect on singing amplitude, although conditional on the intensity range of individual members (Titze and Maxfield, 2017), thereby making it potentially effective in deterring wild animals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Music production and its role in coalition signaling during foraging contexts in a hunter-gatherer society

Chittar,

Jang,

Samuni

et al. 2023

Front. Psychol.

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Music is a cultural activity universally present in all human societies. Several hypotheses have been formulated to understand the possible origins of music and the reasons for its emergence. Here, we test two hypotheses: (1) the coalition signaling hypothesis which posits that music could have emerged as a tool to signal cooperative intent and signal strength of alliances and (2) music as a strategy to deter potential predators. In addition, we further explore the link between tactile cues and the propensity of mothers to sing toward infants. For this, we investigated the singing behaviors of hunter-gatherer mothers during daily foraging trips among the Mbendjele BaYaka in the Republic of the Congo. Although singing is a significant component of their daily activities, such as when walking in the forest or collecting food sources, studies on human music production in hunter-gatherer societies are mostly conducted during their ritual ceremonies. In this study, we collected foraging and singing behavioral data of mothers by using focal follows of five BaYaka women during their foraging trips in the forest. In accordance with our predictions for the coalition signaling hypothesis, women were more likely to sing when present in large groups, especially when group members were less familiar. However, predictions of the predation deterrence hypothesis were not supported as the interaction between group size and distance from the village did not have a significant effect on the likelihood of singing. The latter may be due to limited variation in predation risk in the foraging areas, because of the intense bush meat trade, and hence, future studies should include foraging areas with higher densities of wild animals. Lastly, we found that mothers were more likely to sing when they were carrying infants compared to when infants were close, but carried by others, supporting the prediction that touch plays an important prerequisite role in musical interaction between the mother and child. Our study provides important insight into the role of music as a tool in displaying the intent between or within groups to strengthen potentially conflict-free alliances during joint foraging activities.

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“…pp. 271-272 [296] Edward H. Hagen has proposed [297,298] the "credible coalition quality signaling hypothesis", which argues cooperative humans used synchronized singing in signaling detection and defensive capabilities to external threats, be they predators or conspecifics, so as to deter their attacks. … increasingly cooperative hominins evolved increasingly synchronized visual and auditory displays to warn fellow group members of specific deadly threats and recruit defenders, to credibly signal predators or hominin attackers that they had been detected and would be met with a highly coordinated defensive response, and to signal competing intra-or interspecific groups that the territory was occupied and well-defended by a highly cooperative group.…”

Section: Effectiveness Of Choral Vocalizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Darwin’s road not taken: white sclera, shared intentionality, niche construction, predator fear, teams and Homo origins

Skoyles

2023

Preprint

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Palaeoanthropologists have yet to pinpoint how Homo evolved from Australopithecus. I propose niche construction ending predator ambush and stalking attacks, white sclera, and ultrafast team cognition were key.Human white sclera allows the quick, distant detection of line-of-sight. This is unique. In other primates, predators eliminate conspicuous-eyed individuals. Consequently, nonhuman primates have coloured sclera, hiding gaze direction broadcasting. Recognizing line-of-sight split-second from a distance enables the ultrafast detection of attention shifts that support intercoupling cognitions (cognitive alignment, shared intentionality, and split-second coordination). Under certain conditions, such split-second coordinated teams can niche construct predator-shunning safe habitats. Once shunning replaces hunting, it stops white sclera targeting, allowing it to persist.Constructing predator-safe habitats ended the “landscape of fear” that limited Australopithecus foraging, health, and cognitive/cultural development. Once shunned and freed from fear, these safe habitats allowed previously “wheel-clamped” cognitive potentials, including social learning, to flourish, revolutionizing hominin capacity for cultural evolution and cumulative culture. Thus, predator-safe niche construction transfigured Australopithecus’s phenotype into Homo. White-eyed australopiths, I argue, were the first humans.

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The Biological Roots of Music and Dance

Cited by 10 publications

References 92 publications

“Good Night, Sleep Tight”: Do we have an “Evolutionary Preference” for Placing Beds in Sleeping Rooms? A Replication and Extension of Spörrle and Stich (2010)

“Good Night, Sleep Tight”: Do we have an “Evolutionary Preference” for Placing Beds in Sleeping Rooms? A Replication and Extension of Spörrle and Stich (2010)

Music production and its role in coalition signaling during foraging contexts in a hunter-gatherer society

Darwin’s road not taken: white sclera, shared intentionality, niche construction, predator fear, teams and Homo origins

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