The origins of music

Abstract

Music is a fascinating topic for evolutionary theory, natural philosophy, and narrative construction: music is a highly valued feature of all known living cultures, pervading many aspects of daily life, playing many roles. And music is ancient. The oldest known musical instruments appear in the archaeological record from 40,000 years ago (40 Kya) and from these we can infer even earlier musical artefacts/activities, as yet unrepresented in the archaeological record. I argue that, following research couched in the social brain hypothesis framework, a theoretical basis is emerging for the proposition that the (incremental) evolution of proto-music took hold in the late mid-Pleistocene, roughly 400 Kya, and perhaps earlier. Subsequently, musical activities and traditions incrementally evolved throughout modernity (from 250 Kya onwards), global dispersal from Africa (currently thought to be from 60-100 Kya onwards), and the Holocene (from 12 Kya). In this article I provide an overview of recent research and a sketch of music's evolutionary career. I identify avenues for future research, including work in the evolution of the emotions, and the application of signalling theory to music archaeology.

Music and the Evolution of Embodied Cognition

“…The subsistence lifestyles of such modern indigenous peoples replicate the hunter-gatherer conditions of the Upper Paleolithic period and the early agricultural conditions of the Holocene, but there is no guarantee that current practices recapitulate ancient ones. Still, good work has been done in this area (Morely, 2013;Killin, 2018), and some of the functional generalizations below rely in part on some of this comparative research. At the very least, such research provides us reliable insight into the possible uses of music.…”

From things to thinking: Cognitive archaeology

“…Given these costs it is not a stretch to think that ivory flutes indicated social status or significance (e.g., they may have had a special ritual function). Such differentiation in flutes, particularly between the more practical bone flutes and difficult-to-construct ivory ones, potentially then signals increasing social differentiation (and the social-hierarchical thinking that would accompany it) in Upper Palaeolithic human societies (Killin, 2018).…”

“…While minimal-capacity inferences identify preconditions for some property and infer from the property to those preconditions, causal-association inferences draw on multiple lines of evidence to build a case for a (non-necessary) association between a material trace and a feature of past societies. For instance, Kuhn (2014) argues that cumulative shifts in Late Pleistocene human adornment technologies-from the use of ochre and pigment, to beads, to more complex ornaments and grave goods-reflects changing social dynamics and increasing social complexity, and Killin (2018) fits musical artefacts into this general framework. Evidence relating costly items with little functional purpose to social differentiation (e.g., by examining differences in material culture between more and less differentiated societies) adds to the case for taking the existence of such items as signals of social structure.…”

Free rider recognition—A missing link in the Baldwinian model of music evolution

“…Such circumstances, if stable long enough, would have created a good opportunity for gene-culture co-evolution (Lumsden & Wilson, 1982). In line with this assumption, the origin of human musicality has recently been hypothesized as the result of this co-evolutionary process (Killin, 2016(Killin, , 2017(Killin, , 2018Patel, 2018Patel, , 2021Podlipniak, 2015Podlipniak, , 2016Podlipniak, , 2017Podlipniak, , 2021Savage et al, 2021a;Shilton, 2022;Tomlinson, 2015;van der Schyff & Schiavio, 2017). Taking into account the important role of inventiveness in human musical behavior, some of these co-evolutionary scenarios of music origin have included the "Baldwin effect" (Podlipniak, 2015(Podlipniak, , 2016(Podlipniak, , 2017(Podlipniak, , 2021Savage et al, 2021a), that is, a type of gene-culture co-evolution in which an initially invented behavioral trait is transformed by means of natural selection into an instinctive behavior (Baldwin, 1896a(Baldwin, , 1896b.…”