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

Editorial Review:

The propensity to make music is the most mysterious, wonderful, and neglected feature of humankind: this is where Steven Mithen began, drawing together strands from archaeology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience--and, of course, musicology--to explain why we are so compelled to make and hear music. But music could not be explained without addressing language, and could not be accounted for without understanding the evolution of the human body and mind. Thus Mithen arrived at the wildly ambitious project that unfolds in this book: an exploration of music as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species.

Music is the language of emotion, common wisdom tells us. In The Singing Neanderthals, Mithen introduces us to the science that might support such popular notions. With equal parts scientific rigor and charm, he marshals current evidence about social organization, tool and weapon technologies, hunting and scavenging strategies, habits and brain capacity of all our hominid ancestors, from australopithecines to Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals to Homo sapiens--and comes up with a scenario for a shared musical and linguistic heritage. Along the way he weaves a tapestry of cognitive and expressive worlds--alive with vocalized sound, communal mimicry, sexual display, and rhythmic movement--of various species.

The result is a fascinating work--and a succinct riposte to those, like Steven Pinker, who have dismissed music as a functionless evolutionary byproduct.

(20060227)

Customer Reviews:

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.0 / 5.0

Musical Language and the Evolution of Music:

I have long suspected that music must be connected to language and that the evolution of language was somehow linked to our musical ability. Steven Mithen's exploration of this subject leaves me reflective, impressed and with a great deal to think about. His scientific curiosity -- as we have seen in both The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Science and Religion (1998) and in Before the Ice (2003) -- is epic in scope and yet critical in its method and approach to data (or the lack of... more info

Incisive:

If you love music and powerful feelings it evokes, then you'll love the author's incisive and clear-headed style as he unwraps the origins of music.

Clever Title, Serious Book:

Mithen is a well-published serious evolutionary psychologist, and this book is therefore carefully grounded in current understandings of biological evolution and its relevance to the development of human capacities. His argument is that musical and linguistic abilities are separate evolutionary developments and that whereas in Homo sapiens the linguistic has undercut the role of the more primordial musical; Neanderthals exploited the musical but did not develop linguistic capacities. Mithen's argument is... more info

Wishing it doesn't make it so:

This book so wants to demonstrate that music was a crucial component of human evolution, as if the author, Steven Mithen, wants to explain why he felt the subconscious need to spend so much money on CDs by Queensryche, but he ultimately fails to prove causality. There is nothing inherent in music creation that helped the human species survive the ravages of hunger, disease, pestilence, and war. There was no "battle of the bands" being waged on the prehistoric Serengeti plain to demonstrate defiance of... more info

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