Music makes the Man and Sings the Soul of Mankind

[Guest guest]

Science Journal: Caveman crooners may have aided early human life

Friday, March 31, 2006

 

By Sharon Begley, The Wall Street Journal

 

 

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 Friday, 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.

 

posted....bob the bopper