Hominids' Cave Rave-Ups May Link Music And Speech

Reuters (UK) ^ | 5-31-2006 | Michael Roddy

[blam]

Hominids' cave rave-ups may link music and speech

Wed May 31, 2006 2:15 AM BST
By Michael Roddy

(Reuters) - It was a dark and stormy night, and in a cave in what is now southern France, Neanderthals were singing, dancing and tapping on stalagmites with their fingernails to pass the time.

Did this Ice-Age rave-up happen, perhaps 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, on a cold night in the Pleistocene Epoch? Or is it purely a figment of the imagination of Steven Mithen, professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading in England?

Impossible to know, Mithen, 45, readily admits, but in his book, "The Singing Neanderthals," he has built a strong case that our hominid ancestors had a musical culture, and a rudimentary form of communication that went with it, that has left traces deeply embedded in modern mankind.

Why else, for example, would music have universal appeal and such a strong pull on the human psyche? Why, when we hear music, do we feel the need to tap our feet, or dance?

Why do we think some passages of music paint pictures, or instruments have "conversations" with each other? Why indeed.

In the book, published last year in Britain and this year in the United States, Mithen attempts to re-create -- against all odds -- a "soundscape" of pre-history and plug what he thinks is a huge gap in human knowledge -- the link between language and music.

"Obviously, I'm trying to address a sort of impossible topic. I mean, how stupid for an archaeologist to write about music because you can't hear anything in the past," Mithen, who is also involved in more conventional projects like digs in Scotland, said in an interview at his university office.

AS MANY SOURCES AS POSSIBLE Continued...

[HiTech RedNeck]

The Singing Neanderthals theorizes, for example, that in the millennia before the emergence of anything like words or grammar, language and music were one and the same

Cue the meow-meow-meow-meow commercial soundtrack here

[RightWhale]

Isn’t music in some ways just an extension and exaggeration of speech?

It can be: some can speak in such a way. Much of what we call a 'good speech' is in delivery, which has to include rhythmic and tonal variation. Shakespeare should be done this way; the plays are written poetically which is no accident; he is still the Bard.

[SunkenCiv]

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