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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...

I just finished the strangest, most disconcerting little book. It's called Why Do People Sing?: Music in Human Evolution by Joseph Jordania. If the title hasn't already piqued your interest, its thesis surely will. The thesis is wild, bold, and original, but makes an eerie amount of sense. If true, it would be a revolution — and I don't use the term lightly — in how we understand the evolution of music, cooperation, warfare, and even religion.

Researchers have identified what they say are the oldest-known musical instruments in the world.The flutes, made from bird bone and mammoth ivory, come from a cave in southern Germany which contains early evidence for the occupation of Europe by modern humans - Homo sapiens. Scientists used carbon dating to show that the flutes were between 42,000 and 43,000 years old. The findings are described in the Journal of Human Evolution. A team led by Prof Tom Higham at Oxford University dated animal bones in the same ground layers as the flutes at Geissenkloesterle Cave in Germany's Swabian Jura. Prof Nick...

That we would have a scale virtually unique to that flute (possibly matching some other obscure scale in some parts of the world, but not matching any known historically widespread scale in use). The problem with this non-conclusion is that since the hole-spacings discussed in this essay have only a one-in-hundreds chance to match a pattern of 4 notes in the diatonic major/minor scales, then this conclusion would require accepting a remarkable against-the-odds coincidence of spacings.

Neanderthals sang like sopranos Jennifer Viegas Discovery News Tuesday, 15 March 2005 Neanderthals spoke in a high-pitched, sing-song voice, says one researcher. But not everyone is convinced (Image: iStockphoto) Neanderthals had strong, yet high-pitched, voices that the stocky hominins used for both singing and speaking, says a UK researcher. The theory suggests that Neanderthals, who once lived in Europe from around 200,000 to 35,000 BC, were intelligent and socially complex. It also indicates that although Neanderthals were likely to have represented a unique species, they had more in common with modern humans than previously thought. Stephen Mithen, a professor of...

We all knew that Stone Age humans were hunters and gatherers. But sculptors and flutists? Archeologists said yesterday that they had unearthed the oldest musical instruments ever found - several flutes that inhabitants of southwestern Germany laboriously carved from bone and ivory at least 35,000 years ago. The find suggests just how integral artistic expression may be to human existence: Music apparently flourished even in prehistoric days when mere survival was a full-time endeavor. Fragments of the instruments were found in a cave, amid bones from bears and mammoths and flakes of flint from a prehistoric tool shop. “There were...

Science Journal: Caveman crooners may have aided early human life Friday, March 31, 2006 By Sharon Begley, The Wall Street Journal In Steven Mithen's imagination, the small band of Neanderthals gathered 50,000 years ago around the caves of Le Moustier, in what is now the Dordogne region of France, were butchering carcasses, scraping skins, shaping ax heads -- and singing. One of the fur-clad men started it, a rhythmic sound with rising and falling pitch, and others picked it up, indicating their willingness to cooperate both in the moment and in the future, when the group would have to hunt...

NEANDERTHALS have been misunderstood. The early humanoids traditionally characterised as ape-like brutes were deeply emotional beings with high-pitched voices. They may even have sung to each other, writes Jonathan Leake.