A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity

by Gary Tomlinson

Overview

What is the origin of music? In the last few decades this centuries-old puzzle has been reinvigorated by new archaeological evidence and developments in the fields of cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. In this path-breaking book, renowned musicologist Gary Tomlinson draws from these areas to construct a new narrative for the emergence of human music.

Starting at a period of human pre_history long before Homo sapiens or music existed, Tomlinson describes the incremental attainments that, by changing the communication and society of prehuman species, laid the foundation for musical behaviors in more recent times. He traces in Neanderthals and early sapiens the accumulation and development of these capacities, and he details their coalescence into modern musical behavior across the last hundred millennia.

But A Million Years of Music is not about music alone. Tomlinson builds a model of human evolution that revises our understanding of the interaction of biology and culture across evolutionary time-scales, challenging and enriching current models of our deep history. As he tells his story, he draws in other emerging human traits: language, symbolism, a metaphysical imagination and the ritual it gives rise to, complex social structure, and the use of advanced technologies. Tomlinson’s model of evolution allows him to account for much of what makes us a unique species in the world today and provides a new way of understanding the appearance of humanity in its modern form.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935408666
Publisher:	Zone Books
Publication date:	04/17/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Gary Tomlinson is John Hay Whitney Professor of Music and Humanities at Yale University, where he directs the Whitney Humanities Center. His books include Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others; Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera; and The Singing of the New World: Indigenous Voice in the Era of European Contact.

Table of Contents

Preface: Concepts, Models, Machines 11

I Some First Principles 23

Listening Back 23

Incrementalism 26

Perils of Adaptationism 31

Coevolution, Sociality, and Culture 34

The Biocultural Coevolution of Hominins 41

Looking Forward 48

II 1,000,000 Years Ago: Acheulean Performances 51

Marteau sans maître 51

Acheulean Industries 52

Embodied Symmetries 57

The Chaîne Opératoire and Taskscape 63

Mimetic Traditions 69

Entrainment 76

The Acheulean Increment 81

Poiesis 84

III 500,000 Years Ago: Lower Paleolithic Voices 89

The Vocalized Taskscape 89

Copresence 91

Mindreading and Shared Attention 97

Protolanguage 101

Protodiscourse and Gesture-Calls 106

Myths about Musical Protolanguage 112

Prosody and Melodic Contour 119

The Negotiated Voicescape 123

Excursus: Social Intelligence, Baboon Minds, and Connecrionist Cognition 129

IV 250,000 Years Ago: Neandertal Digitalization 139

Protodiscourse as Protomusical Structure 139

Middle Paleolithic Heuristics 145

Neandertal Lithics 152

Further Protomusical Structure 163

Discrete Neandertals 169

V 100,000 Years Ago: Symbolic et non 173

An Archaeological Conundrum 173

Regressive Symbolism 177

Peirce, Deacon, and Emergent Symbolism 185

Symbolocentrism and the Indexical Challenge 193

System without Symbol: A Phylogeny of Discrete Pitch 197

Glimpses of Modernity 206

VI 100,000-20,000 Years Ago, I: Homo sapiens and the Falling Out of Modern Culture 209

The Fine Grain 209

Migrations and Climates 214

Population and Innovation 219

Repeating Epicvcles: Engravings and Beads out of Africa 225

Trackless Paths 233

VII 100.000-20.000 Years Ago, II: Musicking 237

How the Hunters Returned 237

Differences over Aurignacian Difference 240

What Aurignacian Musical Pipes Tell Us 250

Musicking 260

Musicking on the Transcendental Taskscape 269

VIII Afterward 279

Evolution, Emergence, and History: A Final Note 293

Notes 299

Acknowledgments 345

Index 349

What People are Saying About This

Carolyn Abbate

To have modern philosophical conundrums about music traced back to their aboriginal origins is simply breathtaking, and Tomlinson crosses disciplines with such deep knowledge of so many, and such fearlessness, as to give new meaning to the idea of intellectual synergy

Endorsement

This brilliant book offers the most convincing argument I have seen for how music came to be. If the model of biocultural coevolution proposed here is right, the explanation for music lies not in a simple adaptationist logic—that it was 'good' for us in some way. Instead, music arises from a beautiful spiraling dance between culture and biology extending across the deep history of humanity. In developing this complex and compelling argument, Tomlinson synthesizes a literature that spans both science and the humanities. A Million Years of Music is a model for how scholarship in the twenty-first century can be done.

—Daniel Lord Smail, author of On Deep History and the Brain

From the Publisher

“This is a book that has no peer, one where insights and theories from evolutionary biology, cognition, and neurology are developed into an extraordinarily subtle portrait of the prehistory of music making among hominins and humans. To have modern philosophical conundrums about music traced back to their aboriginal origins is simply breathtaking, and Tomlinson crosses disciplines with such deep knowledge of so many, and such fearlessness, as to give new meaning to the idea of intellectual synergy. A virtuoso performance.” — Carolyn Abbate, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor, Harvard University

“This brilliant book offers the most convincing argument I have seen for how music came to be. If the model of biocultural coevolution proposed here is right, the explanation for music lies not in a simple adaptationist logic — that it was ‘good’ for us in some way. Instead, music arises from a beautiful spiraling dance between culture and biology extending across the deep history of humanity. In developing this complex and compelling argument, Tomlinson synthesizes a literature that spans both science and the humanities. A Million Years of Music is a model for how scholarship in the twenty-first century can be done.” — Daniel Lord Smail, author of On Deep History and the Brain

“Gary Tomlinson’s A Million Years of Music is a brilliant book opening up the frontier between the humanities and sciences. Music’s role in the development of the human capacity for abstract thinking is persuasively traced through an original and virtuosic interdisciplinary narrative. To read this book is to be astonished by the relevance of archaeology and coevolution for thinking through some of the most central questions for music and the humanities in the twenty-first century. Scholars who have drawn from the intellectual legacies of structuralism, post-structuralism, and post­colonialism, with their themes of indeterminacy, contingency, and non-linear emergence, will see that these same themes are key to a contemporary understanding of the relationship between the biological and the social. Tomlinson’s book is both relevant and courageous.” — Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music, Harvard University

Ingrid Monson

Music's role in the development of the human capacity for abstract thinking is persuasively traced through an original and virtuosic interdisciplinary narrative.

Daniel Lord Smail

This brilliant book offers the most convincing argument I have seen for how music came to be. If the model of biocultural coevolution proposed here is right, the explanation for music lies not in a simple adaptationist logic—that it was 'good' for us in some way. Instead, music arises from a beautiful spiraling dance between culture and biology extending across the deep history of humanity. In developing this complex and compelling argument, Tomlinson synthesizes a literature that spans both science and the humanities. A Million Years of Music is a model for how scholarship in the twenty-first century can be done.

Editorial Reviews

This is interdisciplinarity at the deepest level, not merely a surface-level engagement with passing trends in other fields. … A Million Years of Music is a crucial work which provides a fresh perspective on an old problem. It is, in many ways, the ultimate rebuttal of Steven Pinker's glib dismissal of music as a disposable pleasure stimulus. … Written with passion and great erudition, it demonstrates music's role as an essential part of human identity, rivaling speech.

—MAKE Literary Magazine

The past two decades have…seen the development of a “biocultural” hypothesis for the origins and nature of the musical mind that looks beyond the traditional nature-culture dichotomy. … Here the origin of music is not understood within a strict adaptationist framework. Rather, it is explained as an emergent phenomenon involving cycles of (embodied) interactivity with the social and material environment. … Tomlinson's … approach … represents the current state of the art in the field.

—Frontiers in Neuroscience

…written in dialogue with evolutionary biology, cognitive science, palaeoarchaeology, and palaeoanthropology, [this] book is hardly a work of musicology at all, and many of its central claims will demand careful consideration from a wide and diverse academic community. Nevertheless, A Million Years of Music may be the most important contribution to musicology in its short history: in his historical purview and methodological blend of hard science and historiography, Tomlinson sketches a map of the future terrain which every musicologist will one day be obliged to explore.

—Journal of the Royal Musical Association

Expertly interweaving humanities and science, Tomlinson demonstrates how the answers to philosophical questions surrounding modern music can be discovered in their ancient origins.

—Nature

From the Publisher

…written in dialogue with evolutionary biology, cognitive science, palaeoarchaeology, and palaeoanthropology, [this] book is hardly a work of musicology at all, and many of its central claims will demand careful consideration from a wide and diverse academic community. Nevertheless, A Million Years of Music may be the most important contribution to musicology in its short history: in his historical purview and methodological blend of hard science and historiography, Tomlinson sketches a map of the future terrain which every musicologist will one day be obliged to explore.

—Journal of the Royal Musical Association

Reviews