The Origins of Music

When did music begin and what role did it play in human evolution? Interesting questions since every culture in the world has some form of music, and thus it seems to be in our genes. It seems to have played a key role in our adaptations as a species. Our most fundamental adaptation is social. We are a social species. We use social relationships for protection, to help access resources, to get things when needed, and for support if we get sick or have other misfortunes. Being social is what has made people so successful in the natural world. Music is just one of many sub-adaptations that have helped forge strong social bonds. These adaptations include: kinship, language, rituals (including art representing spirit entities), group dancing and singing, group rhythms, smiling and laughing, gift-giving, and sharing. I was espousing these views as early as 1987 in an article and in my 1992 book: Archaeology: The Science of Once and Future Things, but they have been more recently become much more popular. In fact, our increased brain size is now accepted as the result of increased needs for social networking rather than technological needs. Steven Mithen even argued that singing preceded language and formed the basis for language.
So, we can infer that basic singing and rhythmic types of music have very deep roots in human evolution, perhaps emerging 100,000, or even a million or more, years ago. From my experiences in Australia, and as exemplified in films on the Bushmen of South Africa, basic music does not leave any trace in the archaeological record. The voices produce the tones; sticks, stones, stamping feet, or clapping hands produce the rhythms. These don't leave recognizable archaeological traces.
However, later in the Paleolithic, when more complex hunter/gatherer societies begin to appear around 32,000-10,000 years ago in Europe, more sophisticated instruments are found. These include whistles and flutes, beaters for hide covered drums, rattles, and bullroarers. Iaian Morley documented their occurrence in his book, The Prehistory of Music. One of his more interesting findings was that flutes and whistles were found overwhelmingly in cave contexts. These are the same caves where I have suggested that secret societies carried out their rituals and decorated the cave walls with their art. In fact, ethnographic secret societies used precisely these kinds of instruments (whistles and bullroarers) to portray the voices of spirits that they claimed to control (see my volume, The Power of Ritual in Prehistory). What I am proposing is that secret societies had the motivation and means to develop music beyond the simple basics of singing and rhythm. It is for this reason that whistles are part of secret society ritual performances in my adventure novel about the Upper Paleolithic, The Eyes of the Leopard.

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