A review of The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body by Steven Mithen

Non-evolutionary explanations for the origin of music have probably existed for thousands of years—many cultures have considered music to be a gift of the gods or of a particular god. But evolutionarily-informed hypotheses concerning music are rare. Why? To be sure, “music” is complex, but then so is speech, whose evolutionary origins and trajectory have been the subject of theory and lively debate for decades. The observation that everyone learns to talk, whereas musical talent is rare, is true only for music in modern societies: we don’t require everyone who talks to be a master orator. In small-scale societies people sing and dance as readily and competently as they converse. So why is musical behavior universal? What could be its adaptive value? And just what is music anyway? Like speech, it is not one identifiable cognitive capacity but is constituted 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 contour or melody, phrasing, pulse, meter, and rhythm, along with sensitivities to timbre and the dynamics of tempo and auditory volume. Often disregarded are additional important abilities to synchronize and take turns. Individuals vary in endowment of these various features and individual cultures’ musics vary in the importance given to a particular feature. Music is both “passive” and “active”: it is both recognized and produced. And this is only the “nature” of music. In order to begin to think profitably about its biology one needs to be familiar with a daunting array of specialist subjects.