Status
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Description
The propensity to make music is the most mysterious, wonderful, and neglected feature of humankind: this is where Steven Mithen began, drawing together strands from archaeology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience--and, of course, musicology--to explain why we are so compelled to make and hear music. But music could not be explained without addressing language, and could not be accounted for without understanding the evolution of the human body and mind. Thus Mithen arrived at the wildly ambitious project that unfolds in this book: an exploration of music as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species. Music is the language of emotion, common wisdom tells us. In The Singing Neanderthals, Mithen introduces us to the science that might support such popular notions. With equal parts scientific rigor and charm, he marshals current evidence about social organization, tool and weapon technologies, hunting and scavenging strategies, habits and brain capacity of all our hominid ancestors, from australopithecines to Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals to Homo sapiens--and comes up with a scenario for a shared musical and linguistic heritage. Along the way he weaves a tapestry of cognitive and expressive worlds--alive with vocalized sound, communal mimicry, sexual display, and rhythmic movement--of various species. The result is a fascinating work--and a succinct riposte to those, like Steven Pinker, who have dismissed music as a functionless evolutionary byproduct.… (more)
Media reviews
User reviews
Perhaps because I have followed and found very logical the arguments of the Evolutionary Psychologists, who see the mind as a collection of evolved adaptations to a series of specific fitness problems, I found Mithen’s thesis very intuitive and appealing – even though it inevitably involves a great deal of speculation and extrapolation from evidence which can only be described as circumstantial (what the late S.J. Gould unkindly referred to as “Just So” stories).
Because of my enthusiasm for “Prehistory”, I eagerly awaited subsequent books from Mithen. His second book “After the Ice – a Global Human History, 20,000-5,000 BC” was a huge disappointment; suffice it to say, that this was one of the few books I have started, and failed to read through to the end. The present book - although not in any way as groundbreaking or as stimulating as “Prehistory” – is a worthwhile read.
In fact it is a very “worthy” book; the central argument is that, as man’s early ancestors evolved into fully bipedal hominids, they developed a means of communication, which was not language, which Mithen refers to as “Hmmmmm” – Holistic (consisting of whole sounds not parseable into words and syntax), Manipulative (designed to achieve ends, rather than describe), Multi-Modal (sound and body movement), Musical and Mimetic (using mimicry and immitation). The two two main supporting strands for this thesis involve, on the one hand consideration of the neurological and behavioral aspects of music and language, and on the other, hypotheses based on what is known about the lifestyles and selection pressures on early humans at different stages of evolution.
In the early chapters, Mithen’s review of the similarities and differences between music and language, leads to the conclusion that they both evolved from some kind of primitive proto-language-music combination. He then reveals some fascinating aspects about what can only be described as the “competition” between linguistic and musical abilities for brain space. For example, that people with either congenital or acquired neural speech disorders often have enhanced musical abilities e.g perfect pitch – “musical savants”. Or, that most infants possess perfect pitch (like many people suffering from autism). It appears that most babies are born with perfect pitch, which is gradually replaced by a bias toward relative pitch. Language acquisition involves the “unlearning” of perfect pitch (which is disadvantageous, because it prevents “generalization” – understanding that songs sung in different keys, or words spoken at different fundamental frequencies are the same.)
The second half of the book descibes what is known about the lifestyles of various early humans – homo ergaster, homo heidelbergiensis, and the neanderthals of the title – . Mithen’s objective is to demonstrate that, at each of these stages, those individuals best able to communicate with their fellows, be trusted by them and gain their cooperation would have been the fittest (in darwinian terms). There would therefore have been a strong selective pressure for developing effective communication, and Mithen’s argument is that this would have led to the progressive elaboration of communication into his “Hmmmm” – but not to language as we know it. Arguments involving many, many occurrences of words like “might have” and “we can imagine that” (which later morph into less speculative “did” and “were”) are inevitable, given the paucity of hard evidence. They require the reader to very comprehensively “suspend disbelief” until the end, in order to see whether the whole edifice stands up or not.
Where Mithen is able to provide evidence or deductive argument from evidence, he does so. He also very conscientiously presents and evaluates evidence and counter-arguments that might contradict his thesis. Personally, I found the argument that, even the neanderthals - perhaps the closest and most recent relatives of modern humans - lacked language, quite convincing. However, Mithen’s conclusion from this - that music played a major role in their lives (to the extent of having “performance spaces” in their caves) – left me unconvinced.