Why is musical behavior universal? What could be its adaptive, or survival, value? And just what is music anyway? Like speech, it is not one identifiable cognitive capacity but is composed of multiple separate components. Pitch recognition varies from 'tone deaf' to 'perfect' and influences abilities for musical memory, discrimination of melodies, awareness of changing harmony, and even the ability to keep time. Other components of music include perception of melody, meter, and rhythm. Often disregarded are additional important abilities to synchronize and take turns. Individuals vary in their endowment of these different features, and individual cultures vary in the importance they give to a particular musical feature.
Steven Mithen, a cognitive archeologist and professor of early prehistory at Reading University in England, has boldly tackled the difficult subject of the origin and adaptive value of human music. Whether or not one is convinced by his concluding hypothesis, his book The Singing Neanderthals is a treasure trove of information and analysis relevant to understanding the evolution of music. Anyone who subsequently proposes another hypothesis will not be able to neglect the knowledge and questions set forth by Mithen, nor can his conclusions be ignored, based as they are on careful consideration and synthesis of this vast range of specialist material.
Mithen rightly pays tribute to his predecessors in the study of the evolution of music, including John Blacking (1973) and Nils Wallin (1991). Although both contributed important insights and were themselves musically trained, they did not (and at the time could not) command the resources Mithen brings to bear.
Anthropologist and performing classical musician Blacking's ideas lacked evidence from archeology and neurology, while neuroscientist and musicologist Wallin neglected paleontology and ethnomusicology. Mithen considers ideas proposed in more recent comprehensive evolutionary hypotheses of music and incorporates them into the strands that he gradually weaves into two major themes. The first, proposed in a preliminary form by Steven Brown (2000), is the co-evolution of what we today call music and language. The second is a completely original hypothesis of the existence among Neanderthals of a proto-music language that was holistic (not composed of segmented elements), manipulative (influencing emotional states and hence responses of oneself and others), multimodal (using both sound and movement), musical (temporally controlled, rhythmic, and melodic), and mimetic (utilizing sound symbolism and gesture) - what Mithen terms 'the "Hmmmmm" communication system...a prelinguistic musical mode of thought and action.'
Mithen's hypotheses account for important aspects that are usually excluded in the majority of discussions of music: he appreciates that it typically includes bodily movement (toe-tapping, head-nodding, hand-clapping, and dance) and that 'music-making is first and foremost a shared activity, not just in the modern Western world, but throughout human cultures and history.' Although he does not describe the musical behavior of Mbuti or Ba-Benjellé pygmies in Central Africa, or Kaluli villagers in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, as others have done, such small-scale societies well illustrate the ubiquity (and complexity) of communal singing during most daily activity - 'woven tapestries' (Meurant 1995) of sound that may even incorporate the natural sounds of the forest (Feld 2001).
Especially welcome to communication and cognitive studies in general is Mithen's emphasis on the importance of acquiring emotional intelligence - the ability to communicate one's feelings with face, voice, and body, and to decode the emotional signals of others in increasingly complex social interactions. Mithen proposes that 'vocal grooming' (Aiello and Dunbar 1993) would have promoted musical more than verbal. Rather than emphasizing the competitive advantages of comprehending the intentions and desires of others, Mithen points out that the emotional content of musical vocalizations would have been more 'honest' than words - contributing to social commitment and expressing, inducing, and sharing emotion, especially happiness, thereby promoting selectively advantageous cooperative behavior.
Mithen appreciates that behavior may have had more than one adaptive function - and admits that, at least in homo ergaster (a common ancestor of both Neanderthals and homo sapiens), 'singing and dancing may have provided both indicator and esthetic traits for females when choosing mates.' However, he disagrees completely with the now notorious pronouncement by Steven Pinker (1997) that music, although derived from other adaptive capacities, is itself peripheral and even nonadaptive - like a taste for sugar or fat. Music, says Mithen, is too different from language (or anything else) to be a spin-off. He makes the further point that the emotional power of music indicates a long evolutionary history, not a recent invention aimed at pleasure: 'We don't have emotions for fun.'
The book is both thought-provoking and informative, but some of Mithen's claims are questionable. He thinks that modern humans are relatively limited in their musical abilities compared to Neanderthals. He suggests that the evolution of language has inhibited the musical abilities that modern humans have inherited from the common ancestor that we share with Neanderthals. Yet here I think he slips into the Westernized assumptions about music that he decries elsewhere and reveals his own weak spot - insufficient acquaintance with the ethnomusicological literature. It is not the ability, but the factors in modernized societies that have made music a specialty - individuality, competitiveness, compartmentalization, and institutionalization - reinforced by the high degree of literate training required to read (and compose) musical scores as well as literary texts. In small-scale pre-modern societies, everyone participates in music - regularly, spontaneously, and wholeheartedly - and benefits thereby from the many adaptive advantages Mithen recognizes and so expertly describes.