Presumably music is an essential part of human evolution or it wouldn’t be there, but why? (continued)
Richard Widdess
Cambridge, UK
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Music can’t be dismissed as an incidental byproduct of other factors: it has potentially had huge evolutionary significance. Music is of many kinds, fulfils many functions and involves various cognitive capacities, so its evolutionary significance is likely to be complex and varied.
To give one example, humans have a remarkable capacity that is rare in the animal kingdom: the ability to predict a regular beat and entrain our bodies to it. This allows us to engage collectively with other humans in complex musical and dance performances, leading to alignment of emotional states, which in turn may have had a very significant impact on the evolution of human societies.
Early humans may have warded off predators at night through their loud choral singing, a clear survival advantage
Recent has argued that such abilities may have enabled early humans to ward off predators at night through loud choral singing, a clear survival advantage, and that participatory group singing is particularly well equipped to engender processes fundamental to human social evolution, including social bonding, group identity, religious expression and ritual performance. Human society might not have evolved, or survived, without music.
Richard Ellam
Bristol, UK
The idea, raised in a previous answer, that a 40,000-year-old bone flute suggests music may have preceded language is probably mistaken. I dabble in playing and making woodwind instruments. My experience suggests this ancient flute is evidence its makers spoke a complex and sophisticated language, maybe one that was as subtle as any of the thousands that are spoken today.
Making and playing a bone flute isn’t a trivial exercise. You need to know more or less where to put the holes, you need to make the tools to make the holes, and you need someone to teach you how to do all of these things or (if you’re the inventor) someone to teach. It is hard to see how all this could be conveyed successfully unless the makers could talk to each other as well as us.
It may well be that language and music developed together, but I am pretty sure that whoever made that little flute had all the language skills they needed to talk about making it, and how they were much better at flute-making than that idiot in the next cave!
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