Evolution of Music
- From: "Lance" <lachenicht@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 2 Apr 2006 06:38:22 -0700
Caveman Crooners
May Have Helped
Early Humans Survive
Wall Street Journal
March 31, 2006; Page A11
In Steven Mithen's imagination, the small band of Neanderthals gathered
50,000 years ago around the caves of Le Moustier, in what is now the
Dordogne region of France, were butchering carcasses, scraping skins,
shaping ax heads -- and singing.
One of the fur-clad men started it, a rhythmic sound with rising and
falling pitch, and others picked it up, indicating their willingness to
cooperate both in the moment and in the future, when the group would
have to hunt or fend off predators. The music promoted "a sense of
we-ness, of being together in the same situation facing the same
problems," suggests Prof. Mithen, an archaeologist at England's Reading
University. Music, he says, creates "a social rather than a merely
individual identity." And that may solve a longstanding mystery.
Music gives biologists fits. Its ubiquity in human cultures, and strong
evidence that the brain comes preloaded with musical circuits, suggest
that music is as much a product of human evolution as, say, thumbs. But
that raises the question of what music is for. Back in 1871, Darwin
speculated that human music, like bird songs, attracts mates. Or, as he
put it, prelinguistic human ancestors tried "to charm each other with
musical notes and rhythm."
Some scientists today share that view. "Music was shaped by sexual
selection to function mostly as a courtship display," Geoffrey Miller,
of the University of New Mexico, argued in a 2001 paper. But like
Darwin, he bases that conclusion on the belief that music has "no
identifiable survival benefits." If a trait doesn't help creatures
survive, then it can persist generation after generation only if it
helps them reproduce.
Studies in neuroscience and anthropology, however, suggest that music
did help human ancestors survive, particularly before language. In "The
Singing Neanderthals," which Harvard University Press is publishing
today, Prof. Mithen weaves those studies into an intriguing argument
that "language may have been built on the neural underpinnings of
music."
He starts with evidence that music is not merely a side effect of
intelligence and language, as some argue. Instead, recent discoveries
suggest that music lays sole claim to specific neural real estate.
Consider musical savants. Although learning-disabled or retarded, they
have astounding musical abilities. One savant could hardly speak or
understand words, yet he played flawlessly a simple piano melody from
memory despite hearing it only once. In an encore, he added left-hand
chords and transposed it into a minor key.
"Music," says Prof. Mithen, "can exist within the brain in the absence
of language," a sign that the two evolved independently. And since
language impairment does not wipe out musical ability, the latter "must
have a longer evolutionary history."
In the opposite of musical savantism, people with "amusia" can't
perceive changes in rhythm, identify melodies they've heard before or
recognize changes in pitch. Since they have normal hearing and
language, the problem must lie in brain circuits that are
music-specific.
More evidence that the brain has dedicated, inborn musical circuits is
that even babies have musical preferences, finds Sandra Trehub of the
University of Toronto. They listen longer to perfect fifths and perfect
fourths, and look pained by minor thirds.
If music is indeed an innate, stand-alone adaptation, then evolution
could have nursed it along over the eons only if it helped early humans
survive. It did so, Prof. Mithen suggests, because "if music is about
anything, it is about expressing and inducing emotion."
Particular notes elicit the same emotions from most people, regardless
of culture, studies suggest. A major third (prominent in Beethoven's
"Ode to Joy") sounds happy; a minor third (as in the gloomy first
movements of Mahler's Fifth) provokes feelings of sadness and even
doom. A major seventh expresses aspiration. The absence of a third
seems unresolved, loose, as if hanging, adds jazz guitarist Michael
Rood, 17 years old.
The fact that listeners hear the same emotion in a given musical score
is something a Neanderthal crooner might have exploited. Music can
manipulate people's emotional states (think of liturgical music,
martial music or workplace music). Happy people are more cooperative
and creative. By fostering cooperation and creativity among bands of
early, prelanguage human ancestors, music would have given them a
survival edge. "If you can manipulate other people's emotions," says
Prof. Mithen, "you have an advantage."
Music also promotes social bonding, which was crucial when humans were
more often hunted than hunter and finding food was no walk on the
savannah. Proto-music "became a communication system" for "the
expression of emotion and the forging of group identities," argues
Prof. Mithen.
Because music has grammar-like qualities such as recursion, it might
have served an even greater function. With music in the brain, early
humans had the neural foundation for the development of what most
distinguishes us from other animals: symbolic thought and language.
.
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