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Plio-Pleistocene Foundations of Hominin Musicality: Coevolution of Cognition, Sociality, and Music

  • Thematic Issue Article: Symbols, Signals, and the Archaeological Record II
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Abstract

Today, music is ubiquitous, highly valued in all known cultures, playing many roles in human daily life. The ethnographic study of the music of extant human foragers makes this quite apparent. Moreover, music is ancient. Sophisticated bird-bone and ivory flutes dated from 40 kya reveal an even earlier musical-technological tradition. So is music likely to be an entrenched feature of human social life during the long passage to behavioral modernity—say, by 150 kya—or earlier? In this article I sketch an evolutionary model that focuses on hominin vocal musicality and communication in the Pleistocene, tracking between series of phenotypes and changes in ecological, social, cognitive, and informational contexts. The model links musicality and protomusic to a bigger picture of hominin socio-cognitive evolution, making some connections clearer, motivating further theorizing and the search for new evidence.

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Notes

  1. See Tomlinson (2015), Fitch (2006), Currie and Killin (2016), Killin (2013, 2016a), in press; Davies in press. Briefly, Tomlinson’s worry is that the adaptationist hypotheses propose a unitary functional explanation for a manifold phenomenon (i.e., musicality in its many guises) and that in hybrid accounts like Mithen’s, the multiple functions proposed “sit uneasily side by side” (Tomlinson 2015, p. 33). Fitch argues that purported progress in the adaptation/by-product debate is an unproductive distraction from researching the biology and cognition of musicality. Moreover, I have argued that the usefulness of the adaptation/by-product/technology/exaptation distinctions even within the discussion is undermined by the plausibility of gene-culture coevolution and niche construction. The standard adaptationist framework acquiesces in a one-way causal conception of evolution (i.e., environment begetting phenotype) that underemphasises the dynamic consequences of coevolution and niche construction, promoting an unjustified separation of the cultural from the biological. Musicality is a dynamic mosaic; it requires explanation in terms of coevolving social and individual elements, rendering the adaptation/byproduct framework unhelpful. The same is true, e.g., of the evolution of religion (Sterelny 2017).

  2. For instance, Tomlinson envisions Acheulean toolmakers “entraining” to a chaîne opératoire (operational sequence, conceived as unplanned, embodied chains of patterned gesture) vis-à-vis an “external oscillator.” For a critique, see Killin (2016b).

  3. For a richer methodological defense of evolutionary scenario building see Currie and Sterelny (2017), Sterelny (2012), especially §8.

  4. I cannot argue the point here, but in my view, full-fledged music and musical instruments, as well as advances that enable cognizing of musical systems’ theoretic properties (hierarchical ordering/tonal encoding, combinatoriality, and so on—see, e.g., Tomlinson 2015), emerged in coevolutionary tandem with the incremental development of behavioral modernity in general, changes in social organization (from largely mutualistic to reciprocal arrangements—see, e.g., Sterelny 2016), and concretization of very reliable social learning through highly invested teaching, among other factors, throughout the onset and development of behavioral modernity (c. 250–50 kya; McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Sterelny 2011).

  5. This scenario plausibly selects for vocally aggressive intergroup challenges for territory defense: a kind of proto-haka (named after the vocally aggressive greeting chant of New Zealand Māori). This conjecture is not wild: chimpanzees too “produce long range calls [and] also combine drumming and loud vocalizations in coordinated group displays that appear to play an important role in agonistic intergroup relations” (Hagen and Hammerstein 2009, p. 299).

  6. For the dual system theory of the mind (System 1/System 2 cognition) see Evans (2003), Kahneman (2011). The simple/systematic/speculative designation comes from Shaw-Williams (2014), following Liebenberg (1990).

  7. Some rudimentary form of intentional listening may well be very ancient, if we consider the auditory vigilance of predator/prey species as intentionally listening for danger or a target. Still, I take it that humans have developed this top-down capacity, as a matter of degree, beyond that of any other species—so I speak in terms of “increases in intentional listening” rather than the onset of intentional listening per se. A full analysis of intentional listening will need to be more nuanced, but this will do for my purposes here.

  8. Gibbons (Hylobatidae) diverged from the great ape lineage around 15–18.5 mya (Raum et al. 2005).

  9. Stronger versions of the social brain hypothesis—that social complexity as measured by group size is the primary driver of brain size evolution—have recently come under fire, with evidence suggesting that quality of diet plays a significant role (DeCasien et al. 2017), as does technological innovation and other aspects I discuss.

  10. See Morley (2013) for a detailed discussion of the paleoanthropological record with respect to evolution of musicality.

  11. At that time many animals in the Olduvai Basin were forced in the dry season to travel to the only freshwater spring for miles around, because the lake nearby was too saline for many of them to drink. This butchering site was just over 200 m away from the spring, in a lightly wooded plain of shrubbery, trees, and swampland (Ashley et al. 2010; Bunn and Gurtov 2013).

  12. There is also evidence of hominins procuring aquatic prey including crocodiles at 1.95 mya (Braun et al. 2010), presumably quite a feat.

  13. For example, ancient, intentional striking on stalactites and stalagmites has been evidenced in the booming, echoing caves of the Réseau Clastres in the French Pyrenees (Lewis-Williams 2002; Montelle 2004). And there are many simple ways to be musically creative with natural resources that would not surface in the material record too.

  14. For instance, maternal singing has been demonstrated to effectively modulate arousal levels in human infants (as evidenced through, for example, salivary cortisol levels testing; see Shenfield et al. 2003).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to all the participants of “Symbols II” (the “Symbols and Communicative Behaviour in Pleistocene Hominins” workshop, University of Sydney) and the 2016 Empirical Philosophy workshop at Victoria University of Wellington, as well as audiences at the 2015 and 2016 New Zealand Association of Philosophers conferences. Kim Sterelny and Peter Hiscock provided valuable comments on previous versions of the manuscript, and I have benefitted greatly from discussions with Kim Shaw-Williams and Johanna Guest.

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    Anton Killin

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Killin, A. Plio-Pleistocene Foundations of Hominin Musicality: Coevolution of Cognition, Sociality, and Music. Biol Theory 12, 222–235 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-017-0274-6

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