The prototype for the Eurovision song contest?

HMMMMM ... It's a cave rave
From: Reuters
From correspondents in Reading

May 31, 2006

IT WAS a dark and stormy night, and in a cave in what is now southern
France, Neanderthals were singing, dancing and tapping on stalagmites
with their fingernails to pass the time.

Did this Ice-Age rave-up happen, perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 years ago,
on a cold night in the Pleistocene Epoch? Or is it purely a figment of
the imagination of Steven Mithen, professor of early prehistory at the
University of Reading in England?
Impossible to know, Mithen, 45, readily admits, but in his book, The
Singing Neanderthals, he has built a strong case that our hominid
ancestors had a musical culture, and a rudimentary form of
communication that went with it, that has left traces deeply embedded
in modern mankind.

Why else, for example, would music have universal appeal and such a
strong pull on the human psyche? Why, when we hear music, do we feel
the need to tap our feet, or dance?

Why do we think some passages of music paint pictures, or instruments
have "conversations" with each other? Why indeed.

In the book, published last year in Britain and this year in the United
States, Mithen attempts to re-create - against all odds - a
"soundscape" of pre-history and plug what he thinks is a huge gap in
human knowledge - the link between language and music.

"Obviously, I'm trying to address a sort of impossible topic. I mean,
how stupid for an archaeologist to write about music because you can't
hear anything in the past," Mithen, who is also involved in more
conventional projects like digs in Scotland, said in an interview at
his university office.

AS MANY SOURCES AS POSSIBLE

"So I'm trying to draw on as many sources of evidence as possible and
some are more tenuous and more controversial than others, but you put
them together and you make an argument about how music and language
evolved."

He rose to the challenge, he writes in his preface, because "the
propensity to make music is the most mysterious, wonderful and
neglected feature of mankind."

Mithen is not the first to tackle the musical nature of prehistoric
man, and music's links to language, but he's one of the most
industrious. He spent two years thinking about the book, nine months
writing it and his end notes run to 80-plus pages.

To make his case, he draws on everything from scans of the human brain,
studies of music and language ability in people who have suffered brain
damage, skeletal remains of prehistoric hominids - and his own
imagination.

He argues that Neanderthals, as well as some other, early hominids,
developed a form of communication he refers to by the acronym "HMMMMM"
- standing for "holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and
mimetic."

In brief, it means prehistoric man or woman used phrases, a modern
example of which is the almost universal expression of distaste "yuck,"
to communicate simple suggestions or commands, such as "let's go hunt"
or "food to share." The "multi-modal" part refers to the use of body
language, which Mithen says hominids were much more attuned to than we
are today.

This wasn't language as we know it, in which words are assembled to
convey meaning, but was more like a phrase of music. The individual
notes mean nothing, but the sound as a whole can touch us to the quick.
Or, in the case of Neanderthals, sing everyone to come to supper.

MOTHERS AND BABIES

It's a bit of a leap to ask modern readers to accept that our ancestors
uttered "holistic" phrases, all traces of which have long since
vanished into the ether.

However, Mithen says we still resort to something like this, most
notably when mothers talk to babies. It is the cooing and reassuring
sounds she makes that count, not the language, since infants at first
don't know Chinese from Hungarian from English.

He also remarks on the prosody, rhythm and pitch of modern language,
and points out that hominids have shared ancestors millions of years
ago, with each other and with apes and other primates, whose grunts and
pants also have musical qualities.

A little wistfully, he notes that Neanderthals, despite having a brain
even larger than homo sapiens - the rumbler from the jungles of Africa
who would eventually supplant them - and vocal tracts and larynxes
suited to singing or talking, did not make the leap to modern language
and became extinct.

Perhaps Neanderthals were content to sing and dance in their caves,
ignoring innovation and turning out the same hand axe for 200,000
years. They may never have known what hit them.

Mithen believes it is important that we, modern-day homosapiens who
have perfected the use of word-based language to communicate, do not
ignore our music-loving "inner Neanderthal."

"In the vast majority of cultures, kids are growing up just doing music
as a musical thing, yet in our culture we're excluding the majority of
children from participating because music's become an elitist
activity," said the author, who was assigned to woodworking after he
auditioned for the choir.

"I don't think we're enabling kids to fulfil their potential ...
because they've evolved, and we were born, to be musical."

Full Text at News.com.au
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,19316182-13762,00.html

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