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A timeline for the development of protomusic and modern music showing the adaptations related to rhythmical and vocal musical functions and the hominins associated with it. Images of hominins from Bruner (2007).
Source publication
The adaptive history of two components of music, rhythmic entrained movement and complex learned vocalization, is examined. The development of habitual bipedal locomotion around 1.6 million years ago made running possible and coincided with distinct changes in the vestibular canal dimensions. The vestibular system of the inner ear clearly plays a r...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... evolution is considerably more complex (Wood & Collard 1999;Wood & Richmond 2000) than apparent in this short summary that aims merely to describe the main species discussed in this paper. Figure 1 presents a simplified representation of the musical evolutionary history of Homo ergaster, Homo heidelbergensis and Homo sapiens developed in this paper. Morley and Mithen discuss similar concepts. ...
Citations
... The South African archaeologist Sarah Wurz (2009) is one who suggests that primate grunts helped pave the way to hominin words. She notes that primate grunting engages both the intercostal chest muscles and the laryngeal throat ones, and is automatically produced by them when making some sort of effort. ...
... So an increased repertoire of dance movements could express more complex messages. Moreover, the South African archaeologist Sarah Wurz (2009) comments that the movements of early bipeds such as walking, running, stamping and jumping not only stimulated their balance organs but also effected their auditory rhythms. The rhythms stomped onto the ground that underpin 'contagious polyphony' is a case in point. ...
ABSTRACT FOR WEB VERSION OF BOOK This monograph is on the evolutionary importance of music for hominin communication and in particular the emergence of a sing-song gestural proto language(or clusters of such languages) in early hunter-gatherer forms of the Homo genus from around one million years ago. The more complex messages of this primordial language consisted of holistic combinations or
strings of utterances, melodic pitches and gestures that had to be learnt and expressed in their entirety, although a slight degree of lexical juggling of the components of these combinatory phrases was possible. Inspite of not being a fully open grammatical, this proto language that some refer to a ‘musilanguage’ was, nevertheless, capable of transmitting simple symbolic information. For this hypothetical language the monogram draws on primate studies, the fossil record, adult-infant communication, genetics, cognitive studies, linguistics, musicology: and the fact that the very first although slight archaeological evidence symbolic behaviour appears in the Homo genus from around 600,000 years ago As such, the Homo-made musilanguage represents a halfway house between instinctive primate communication and grammatical language that appeared in modern humans around 200,000 years ago. A short synopsis of the ideas presented in this book is also found in my chapter entitled ‘Nine Reasons that Support Prehistoric Hominin Musicality and Musilanguage’ in the 2020 book ‘Music in Human Experience: Perspectives on a Musical Species’ edited by Johnathan Friedmann, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK. [ISBN (10): 1-5275-8010-5 & (13): 978-1-5275-8010-7]
... After all, pitch syntax is based on pitch hierarchy which necessitates the perception and production of differentiated pitches. As changes of innervation occurred in the vocal tracts of Homo erectus to facilitate the voluntary control of F 0 , reaching a form which most probably enabled the sustenance of F 0 among Homo heidelbergensis (Morley, 2013;Wurz, 2009), it is reasonable to assume that pitch syntax appeared no earlier than 700,000 BP. Therefore, the musical protolanguage proposed in this article had to evolve after that time, but before 300,000 -200,000 BP, the time of the appearance of anatomically modern humans. ...
Music and speech are both auditory communicative phenomena which may have a common evolutionary origin. Both Pinker and Patel have proposed that the ‘rule-governed arrangements’ found in music are comparable to, and possibly derive from, the capacity for syntax that is found in language. Other scholars, such as Fitch and Charnavel, have alternatively suggested that the arrangements found in dance, music, and language stem from more general cognitive capacities related to hierarchical grouping principles. However, different syntactic phenomena such as rhythm syntax, pitch syntax, phonological syntax, and language grammar, work in a variety of disparate ways, which suggests that they have evolved owing to different adaptive pressures. This paper aims to show that pitch syntax was once part of a protolanguage designed to communicate internal mental states. It is proposed that increased social complexity caused this protolanguage to interact and eventually merge with another protolanguage specialized in communicating propositional meaning. It is also hypothesized that Baldwinian evolution led to the exaptation of combinatorial mechanisms already present in a musical protolanguage to create a new communicative system. As a result, a new capacity evolved that enabled the implicit learning of language grammar.
... Very little importance was attached to these artifacts at the time of their discovery, in part owing to the isolated nature of the finds. Sarah Wurz initiated a research program to investigate the origins of musical expression in the Stone Age of southern Africa (Wurz 2009). She recognized that purposeful sound-making activities could help generate group cohesion and synchronization and would have formed a fundamental facet of human cognitive and social development. ...
I review five “vanished technologies” from southern Africa that have been brought to light through use-wear studies of bone tools. Most of the examples discussed here represent the first recognition of these technologies in the region and provide unique insights into the technological and behavioral repertoires of past humans and hominins. Hominin foraging and subsistence practices are inferred from the use-wear patterns on modified bones from four sites in the Cradle of Humankind. Early evidence for bow-and-arrow technology comes from Sibudu Cave and Klasies River Main site, with the evidence from the latter site extending the known distribution of this technology farther south. Use-wear has shown that modified bones, thought to have been pendants, were used in a manner more consistent with the production of sound and likely represent early musical instruments. In a similar vein, use-wear has shown that several bone points, conventionally interpreted as arrowheads, were used for domestic activities, such as making reed mats or baskets. Among some of the earliest state-level societies in southern Africa, the presence of bone hoes attests to the practice of small-scale garden agriculture, placing greater emphasis on individual agency within these complex societies. Use-wear studies continue to highlight the absurdity of attributing function based on shape.
... Homo Heidelbergensis (Wurz 2010). Its newborns must have shared music/language capacities with the 164 modern newborns, except that their parents did not expose them to musicking as we know it today. ...
A very popular, yet barely researched, musical instrument is the Jew's Harp (JH). Its earliest archaeological occurrences date back to the early Bronze Age, but its simplest constructions, made of tree twigs and bark, along with its cross-cultural connection to shamanic beliefs and doxological status, suggest its prehistoric use. I outline a possible scenario in which the spread of the cult of ancestral plants across this vast region, from Altai to Sakhalin, and the cult of the "singing mask" of the Tuva-Amur area may have given special importance to musicking on the JH, initiating its spread along pastoralism to the neighboring regions. The influence of the ancient "talking JH" tradition would explain vowel harmony found in most languages of the Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic families of the Transeurasian (aka "Altaic") family, as well as in neighboring Uralic languages - all of which are spoken by peoples that regularly use the JH.
... An encompassing definition of 'music' is that it entails expression through organized sound as well as intentional rhythmical movement or dance. From this perspective music is much more than a Western concept of concert hall performances by trained individuals, it constitutes intentional action of sound production combined with entrained body movement (Wurz, 2009, see also Cross and Morley, 2008). Yet, despite its cultural importance, archaeomusicology and its components are under-researched in South Africa, indeed in Africa as a whole. ...
... These chemicals enhance social bonding and influence feelings of anticipation and reward satisfaction. Purposeful sound-making activity generates group cohesion, encourages entrainment and synchronization (Wurz, 2009) and this would certainly have provided an advantage in the confrontation with death. While not death defeating we argue here that the musical instruments and related behaviours will have provided assurances to the people who buried their dead at Matjes River. ...
This paper describes possible sound-producing artefacts from two Later Stone Age deposits in the southern Cape, South Africa. Implements previously described as a 'wirra wirra' or 'pendant' from Klasies River main site (KRM), a 'woer woer' or 'bullroarer' and four 'pendants' from Matjes River (MR) are analysed and their sound producing qualities assessed through an actualistic research programme. For comparative purposes, a replica of an eth-nographic 'spinning disk' was also spun and its sound recorded. All of the implements, except the MR 'woer woer' produced a sustained, pulsed, whirring sound when spun. Minor adjustments to the MR 5135 replica resulted in successful sound production. The frequency range of the KRM replica and ethnographic KK058 implement produced a frequency variation of between 52 Hz and 200 Hz. The frequency range of the pendant replicas varied from 55.55 to 250 Hz, comparable to other bullroarers. Spinning produces use-wear predominantly on the left laterals of the perforations, whereas pendant use produces use-wear along the upper sector of the perforation , thus allowing us to distinguish these two uses based on the placement of use-wear. We conclude that one of the bone artefacts previously thought to be a pendant, MR 40, most likely functioned as an instrument to produce sound. This investigation thus experimentally confirms that earlier hypotheses that the 'wirra wirra' from KRM and the 'bullroarer' from MR were aerophones are judicious. In addition we demonstrate for the first time that some archaeological pendants, such as MR 40, may have been used as free aerophones or bullroarers.
... And human ear is remarkably effective in extraction of behaviorally relevant information from the sound of human voice (i.e., speaker's gender, age, emotional state)-testifying to the centrality of spectral data to human life (Bowling, 2012). Anthropological evidence shows that Homo heidelbergensis had modern hearing capabilities as well as modern vocal anatomy, which sets the time-frame for origin of music 700,000-300,000 years ago (Wurz, 2010). Singing must have been the prime reason for the descent of larynx which enabled sustenance of pitch throughout vocalization-without dropping it, as nonhuman primates do (Maclarnon and Hewitt, 2004) 20 . ...
This paper presents a view into the pre-history of music, using the most recent resources and information on biology, ethnomusicology, music sociology, archeology, and psychoacoustics. The pattern of acquisition of musical skills in childhood is used as a framework for reconstructing the genesis and general course of development of principles of tonal organization in music. The existing data of comparative ethnomusicology is placed into this framework, and plotted against the data of perception of melody and harmony, in an attempt to distinguish the biological and cultural substrates for each of the schemes of tonal organization, which are identified in the traditional music of the ethnicities that have retained a hunter/gatherer lifestyle.
The lineage of such schemes is proposed based on the similarity/dissimilarity of cognitive resources that each scheme requires – supported with the available empirical evidence, such as analysis of intervallic structure in the hole placement of the Paleolithic and Neolithic “bone flutes.” As a result, pentatonic and heptatonic schemes of tonal organization appear to constitute two alternative prehistoric “mainstream” methods of ordering musical tones, each cultivating its own worldview and philosophy.
... To summarize, several fossil characteristics (e.g., the presence and development of Broca's area as can be read from skull endocasts, or indications of a descended larynx) and genetic mutations (e.g., the FoxP2 mutations: Krause et al., 2007) are usually interpreted as being indicative of articulate language. However, it is generally overlooked that these might just as well, and more parsimoniously, be indicative of diving (breath holding), running (see Wurz, 2009) and musical (song production) abilities (Maess et al., 2001), and consequently point to evolutionary events that are preadaptations for language, but that are not necessarily indicative of the presence of language. ...
... Because adaptation to dry, open land seems an unlikely explanation for upright walking, upright walking itself is an unlikely explanation for several uniquely human characteristics, such as a descended larynx and voluntary breath control, which are considered necessary (pre)adaptations for the development of our musicality and linguistic abilities. For an opposite viewpoint, discussing how the development of our musical abilities were linked to our presumed running adaptations, see Wurz (2009). As stated before (Vaneechoutte et al., 2011b), most of the preadaptations needed for song and speech, including vocal learning (absent in all terrestrial mammals, except man and the elephant), can be most straightforwardly explained by adopting the view that our past was much wetter than is generally assumed. ...
... Indeed, there are several problems with the interpretation of fossil data, as summarized by Fitch (2000) and extensively addressed by Wurz (2009). ...
Articulate language depends on very different abilities, such as vocal dexterity, vocal mimicking and the acquirement by children of the very different and arbitrary phonology and grammatical structure of any language. A vast array of experiments confirm that children acquire grammar by the use of prosodic clues, basically intonation and pitch, in combination with, e.g., facial expression and gesture. Prosodic clues, provided by speech, are exaggerated in infantdirected speech (motherese). Moreover, strong overlap between musical and linguistic syntactic abilities in the temporal lobes of the brain has been established. A musical origin of language at the evolutionary level (for the species Homo sapiens) and at the ontogenetic level (for each newborn) is parsimonious and no longer refutable. We then should ask why song, i.e., vocal dexterity and vocal learning, was evolved in our species and why it is largely absent from other 'terrestrial' animals, including other primates, but present in disjoint groups such as cetaceans, seals, bats and three orders of birds? I argue that this enigma, together with a long list of other specifically human characteristics, is best understood by assuming that our recent ancestors (from 3 million years ago onwards) adopted a shallow water diving lifestyle. The swimming and diving adaptations of the upper airway (and vocal) tract led to increased vocal dexterity and song, and to increased fine tuning of motoric and mimicking abilities. These are shared by creatures that can freely move in three dimensions (swimming and flying animals) and that can respond instantaneously to the behavioural changes of other animals. Increased bodily mimicking, together with increased vocal dexterity, both a consequence of a semi-Aquatic lifestyle, led to integrated song and dance, which predisposed towards producing and mimicking speech and gesture, and to the ability to use prosodic clues to learn the grammar of whichever language.
