The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body

The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body by Steven Mithen Harvard University Press; $25.95

Among the most dicey academic inquiries are the ones that deal with the origin of human consciousness. It is hard enough to know what goes on in the heads of our contemporaries, who speak and write in a language we share, without speculating about ancestors who spoke in languages long lost and who never wrote anything down. To explore the prehistoric mind-set, the best one can do is reconstruct plausible scenarios from bones, pottery, and other surviving artifacts. Evidence of primitive consciousness, then, by its very nature, is fragmentary, circumstantial, and open to a wide range of interpretation.

Faced with difficulties of such daunting scope, Steven Mithen, professor of archaeology at the University of Reading in England, remains undaunted. In his 1996 book, The Prehistory of the Mind, he argued that both the origins of thought and the origins of human language are natural outcomes of evolution. But according to the first chapter of Mithen's latest work, The Singing Neanderthals, that story was incomplete.

What it neglected was the central role of music in the psychosocial makeup of our species. Is it possible to imagine Zog the caveman with a tin ear, not feeling the rhythm in the chipping of a stone axe? Did Zog never feel the urge to move his feet when he wasn't stalking a tasty mammoth? Did he never hum a tune, pound a drum, or join in a communal dance? "Without music," Mithen writes, "the prehistoric past is just too quiet to be believed."

And so we're off, on a journey across the disciplines, gleaning from each an instructive perspective on the origins of human music-making. Neurological studies, for instance, suggest the brain is somehow wired for music, more or less independently of its circuitry for speech. Lesions and strokes can lead to amusia, the inability to comprehend or produce music. The medical literature has documented cases of stroke patients who could speak and write, but could no longer sing or play an instrument.

Developmental psychologists have established that even babies respond to music. The rhythm and modulation of a mother's voice holds her baby's attention before the child can distinguish the meanings of individual words. That's why parents sing lullabies, and perhaps why adults naturally adopt a high-pitched singsong delivery when they speak to children. The musicality of speech may even help in learning language: the melody, it seems, precedes the message.

Thus, Mithen speculates, humanity might have developed much as the individual does: music first, then language. From an evolutionary standpoint, music would not only help ensure the well-being of the individual, but also the cohesiveness of the group. Calling on primate studies, Mithen likens group music-making to grooming, an activity that evokes feelings of contentment and belonging. When Zog's family beat out the rhythm of a dance, their music-making may have helped them work together, thus enhancing their success in the hunt and giving them an evolutionary advantage over other families with less musical ability. Perhaps they also musically mimicked the motions and behaviors of the animals they hunted. Music could have served as an early form of communication, characterized by an acronym coined by Mithen: "Hmmmmm." In other words, he explains, the earliest language was Holistic (not expressed so much in words as by overall feeling); manipulative (aimed at affecting the behavior of others); multi-modal (expressed as rhythm, melody, and so forth); musical; and mimetic (imitative).

"May have" and "might have" are the most common qualifiers in Mithen's book, and by the time he has woven together all the strands of this argument, the reader may be intoning Hmmmmm in counterpoint with the author. Taken as a look at the natural history of music, Mithen's book is thoughtful and certainly entertaining. But does it make an airtight case--as the subtitle suggests--for "the origins of music, language, mind, and body"? Or is it just a clever academic song and dance?

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.

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