by Jonny Meister, Host/Producer of The Blues Show on WXPN

January 1, 200,000 B. C. E.

One of the greatest moments in music history has to be the birth of music, right? That’s where you usually start the story. Of course, we don’t have an exact “birthday” for music, but anthropologists, biologists, neurologists, archaeologists, and others are doing some amazing research. I think it is Nils L. Wallin who coined the word “biomusicology” to describe a new approach to the origins of music from a biological, not just the cultural, perspective. Once the poor stepchild, in a family where language was the favored child, music now appears in the minds of some of these new scholars as a precursor to language, a necessary part of the development of language. Steven Mithen in his excellent book “The Singing Neanderthals” talks a lot about infant-directed speech. When we talk to babies, we do so in a much more musical way than we do when we talk to adults. The musical quality of language may be learned before some of its other qualities, such as syntax and semantics. Music, and the musical quality of language (”prosody”) convey the emotional information we share, while syntax and semantics handle more of the referential meanings of things.

Depending on your definition of “singing”, birds sing, and various other animals vocalize in a way that is very musical. Gibbons, who are relatively close cousins to our species, are known for the beautiful duets that “husband” and “wife” (they’re actually monogamous!) sing to each other. Mithen hypothesizes that previous variations of “homo” (we are “homo sapiens”, and all the other types of “homo” have died out) had musical utterances, some with specific meanings attached to them. Drawing on Charles Darwin and others, he examines the role of music in our behavior from a number of points of view. Music may have played a role in mate selection. The suggestion here is that good musical skills were “indicators” of good genes, and therefore attractive to potential mates. Anyone watching groupies pursuing a rock star might well see evidence of this in that behavior. Music may also have played a role in communicating with babies. It also helped direct group behaviors (think of religious services) by putting groups in a common mood and just synchronizing everyone’s behavior.

If earlier versions of our species made music for purposes such as these (it’s unlikely they had actual religion, but they may have had mood-synchronizing events), they probably didn’t know they were “making music” and couldn’t articulate it as such. They lacked our “cognitive fluidity” and couldn’t think outside of restricted domains of experience, according to Mithen. Did you ever hear an ape say, “Now here’s one from my forthcoming self-titled album?”

Our rhythmic sense may have come from our becoming bipedal… it took more rhythmic skill to walk on two feet than on all fours, and related changes in our throats may have facilitated a greater ability to produce sounds. Mithen cites the work of anthropologist Leslie Aiello on this idea. we walk, therefore we sing…?

Homo sapiens is probably the first creature with the ability to look at itself intellectually from outside of the behaviors “wired” into it; I don’t really “count” the singing of the gibbons, or of most of our evolutionary ancestors, because although it may be music to us, they couldn’t really recognize that “Now I’m going to make some music for entertainment” the way we do. Mithen draws on work by Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks suggesting that modern humans may have been around 200,000 years ago. Genetic studies also suggest that our version of a gene called FOXP2, that seems needed for language, also appeared around 200,000 years ago.

So, Mithen believes we had some language, and an ability to make music, knowingly as music, that long ago, in small, scattered pockets of humans. We didn’t really solidify our position until around 50,000 years ago, and then we spread out all over the place, from Africa, where our species began. We found the Neanderthals already in Europe, who, despite Mithen’s book title, were probably not great musicians in his opinion. Whether we knocked them off or just outplayed them for scarce resources isn’t known, but homo sapiens completely replaced other varieties of homo… and we apparently sang and played instruments while doing it, having words for “music” in our vocabulary and an understanding of what it meant to make music for music’s sake, that went beyond a mere instinctive behavior. Some evidence of notation of music can be found from 5000 years ago, but obviously music was around long before that.

I wrote Steven Mithen a fan letter and said I wished I had a time machine to go back and record some of this prehistoric music he describes so engagingly; he admitted it would be wonderful, but also said something I hadn’t thought of– my time machine might put him, an archaeologist, out of work.