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A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity
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 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.
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 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.
368 pages, Paperback
First published March 27, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 12, 2019
A somewhat misleading title--this is less a work concerning music per se than an evolutionary theoretical treatise on technicity with music as a distant guidepost. Tomlinson offers a sweeping and convincing emergentist account of the early hominid developments which ultimately--though, as he contends, gradually and piecemeal--led to the practices of symbolic communication and music-making. His background as a professional musicologist serves as a novel position to critique the likes of Steven Pinker and his accolades, for whom music is not seen for its complex matrix of technical, social, behavioral and cognitive singularities, but as mere byproduct of language.
"A Million Years" serves too as a scientific engagement with the trajectory of technic-phenomenological philosophy brought to bear in Bernard Stiegler's "Technics and Time", incidentally furthering that work's general thesis ("the history of man is the history of technics") while bolstering some of its empirical shortcomings.
Stiegler argues that man as such (read: Dasein) does not exist prior to his externalization into technical objects, for temporality is constituted by the arrival of technicity. His line of argumentation is couched in terms of Husserlian time-consciousness: technology qua externalization marks the ability for future-oriented thought in "protention", or what Tomlinson calls "thinking-at-a-distance". Prior to protention, there is only the experience of a succession of now-moments, with no faculty for abstraction. Hence, the capacity to create primitive carving tools should then imply the presence of a protentive faculty, as following Gilbert Simondon, a technical object's abstract manifestation in an inventor's mind is pre-requisite for concretization.
What this phenomenological line of thinking neglects, however, is non-intentional technical behavior. Tomlinson argues with a dynamic-systems model that the chain of operations producing bilateral flint tools may well be ascribed to sedimented patterns of mimetic motor activity reinforced by an epicycle of socio-material interactions ("social" here understood as describing non-transcendental, nonsymbolically-mediated face-to-face interactions) over the longue durée. One then arrives at an even more radical contention vis-a-vis Stiegler: that technics precedes temporality.
"A Million Years" serves too as a scientific engagement with the trajectory of technic-phenomenological philosophy brought to bear in Bernard Stiegler's "Technics and Time", incidentally furthering that work's general thesis ("the history of man is the history of technics") while bolstering some of its empirical shortcomings.
Stiegler argues that man as such (read: Dasein) does not exist prior to his externalization into technical objects, for temporality is constituted by the arrival of technicity. His line of argumentation is couched in terms of Husserlian time-consciousness: technology qua externalization marks the ability for future-oriented thought in "protention", or what Tomlinson calls "thinking-at-a-distance". Prior to protention, there is only the experience of a succession of now-moments, with no faculty for abstraction. Hence, the capacity to create primitive carving tools should then imply the presence of a protentive faculty, as following Gilbert Simondon, a technical object's abstract manifestation in an inventor's mind is pre-requisite for concretization.
What this phenomenological line of thinking neglects, however, is non-intentional technical behavior. Tomlinson argues with a dynamic-systems model that the chain of operations producing bilateral flint tools may well be ascribed to sedimented patterns of mimetic motor activity reinforced by an epicycle of socio-material interactions ("social" here understood as describing non-transcendental, nonsymbolically-mediated face-to-face interactions) over the longue durée. One then arrives at an even more radical contention vis-a-vis Stiegler: that technics precedes temporality.
January 7, 2021
This is a peculiar book. As the other reviews say, the book is heavier on evolutionary theory than on music, which makes sense because his history ends as soon as bone flutes provide us actual evidence of music. Instead, it's a reevaluation of what various scientists have to say about the course of human development. The first few chapters discuss how various sorts of cognitive capacities needed for music---hierarchy, thinking in symbols, certain sorts of memory, etc---arose in evolution, and the last chapters hypothesize how these might have congealed into what we now call music.
A paradox of the book is why it needed the author it has. The author, Gary Tomlinson, was until this book better known a historical musicologist focusing on 16th (+-) century Europe. So, what benefit do we get from this book being written from his perspective, rather than from an evolutionist or a music psychologist? That's not entirely clear to me. Certainly he approaches the matter with a different set of priorities, and writes his literature review with a less rigorously-"scientific" audience in mind, which may well be contribution enough.
A paradox of the book is why it needed the author it has. The author, Gary Tomlinson, was until this book better known a historical musicologist focusing on 16th (+-) century Europe. So, what benefit do we get from this book being written from his perspective, rather than from an evolutionist or a music psychologist? That's not entirely clear to me. Certainly he approaches the matter with a different set of priorities, and writes his literature review with a less rigorously-"scientific" audience in mind, which may well be contribution enough.
January 29, 2026
Not much about music, and quite difficult to read. However, informative about human evolution.
This book has at least two serious flaws. First of all, it does not talk much about music. A cursory perusal of the Internet produced more information on the history of music and musical instruments. My review of what he writes about the history of music is mostly in my comment 3, below. Secondly, the book is written in extremely difficult prose, as I explain in comment 1 below.
Looking at it as a novel perspective on human evolution, it is valuable. The musicologist Tomlinson takes exception to almost every expert who has written on the subject and produces some valuable insights.
Accentuating the positive, I am putting my caveats about its shortcomings into the first few comments on this review.
Though the subject of the book is music, it is dedicated almost exclusively to human evolution over the million year period under discussion. He assumes some familiarity with the forms of extinct hominins. I include a catalog as comment 2.
Tomlinson has a deep familiarity with the experts who have worked in these various disciplines. He finds that each breed of specialist tends to interpret human evolution through the lens of his own specialty. As none of these disciplines can claim Tomlinson, a musicologist, he has the freedom to assess the insights available from each. This book is a comprehensive and useful compilation of such insights.
Linguists point out that language involves a kind of digital signaling, in which words are divided into phonemes, discrete sounds with no intrinsic meaning, only arbitrarily assigned symbolic meanings depending on how they are used in combination. Animal sounds, on the other hand, tend to be analog. The degree of a cat's comfort or discomfort is expressed by the volume of his purr or yowl.
In speaking, however, pitch is analog. It does not carry discrete meaning. A woman may pitch her voice higher when talking sweetly to a baby or angrily to her husband.
Cadence is likewise analog in speech. Different people speak in different cadences, and purposefully speaking slowly may, for instance, give gravity to the utterance.
Tomlinson points out that music has it the other way around. Pitch and cadence are discrete whereas the tonal quality is analog. A note is a note, whether played by a piano or a violin.
Not all qualities of language and music can be forced into this dichotomy. The digital qualities are fairly well defined, but there is a lot of room in the analog space for emotion in both language and music.
Building on this observation, Tomlinson looks into the evolutionary record for characteristics of minds required to produce either music or language. Inasmuch as far more study has been given to language and music, he naturally proceeds mostly from arguments put forth by scientists who have looked into the evolution of language.
Tomlinson points out that our human way of thinking has us asking end-directed questions such as "What is it for?" and "Why did they want to do this?" This is how humans think. We and execute plans we already have in mind. But animals don't plan – they just do. The early part of the book delves into the evolution of a mind capable of planning. There are several key concepts.
Shared attention is important. Two animals being focused on the same object, be it prey, a mate or a stone being worked, represents a major evolutionary jump.
Theory of mind is related. If one animal has a theory of what the other animal is thinking, they can anticipate what the other animal will do.
Cooperation grows out of shared attention and a theory of mind. Humans throughout the million years under consideration became increasingly good at group efforts, such as coordinated hunts for large mammals. I find Robbins Burling, upon whom Tomlinson leans heavily, gives a much more lucid explanation in "The Talking Ape."
Tomlinson points out that other animals such as chimpanzees and wolves also hunt in groups. Their hunting differs in that it is basically each individual seeking his own immediate self-interest. They do not differentiate roles to be taken in the hunt, nor is there any protocol for sharing the spoils. These forms of behavior require the kind of future-orientation that is generally beyond the intellectual capability of nonhuman animals.
The material culture of the hominins under discussion included stones and fire – these leave the most easily found traces – and sticks, skins, and other less durable organic artifacts. Tomlinson devotes a lot of attention to stones.
Humanoids first started intentionally breaking stones to use as tools about 2.6 million years ago. They would break a few chips off in order to get a sharp edge.
Acheulean stone tools, used from 1.7 million years ago up until the dawn of agriculture, involved more chipping and demonstrated a characteristic bilateral symmetry. Though they improved slowly through the eons, what is most remarkable is their stasis – the fact that the same designs remained in use for so long. Tomlinson infers a great deal about the mental state of prehistoric humanoids from these tools.
We moderns would wrongly assume that a hominin would go about making stone tools the way we would. He would
(1) Decide that he needed a tool, then
(2) Choose the stone to make the tool, then
(3) Make the tool, then
(4) Keep the tool until he needed it.
Tomlinson would call this sequence by the term, operative chain, or chaîne opératoire, coined by Frenchman Leroi-Gourhan in the nineteen sixties. However, he contends that the sequence described above involves considerably more abstraction, thinking-at-a-distance than those hominins were capable of. Their sequence might be:
(1) Kill something edible,
(2) Discover they need to cut it up,
(3) Scout around for a rock to cut it,
(4) Chip the rock to make it sharper, if necessary,
(5) Butcher the animal,
(6) Eat the animal and
(7) Throw the rock away.
This operative chain does not involve planning. It does involve mimetic learning – one hominin observing another to learn how to sharpen rocks.
Tomlinson attributes the fact that the sharpened stones displayed bilateral symmetry to cultural rather than aesthetic factors. They didn't plan it that way – they just did it that way.
Archaeologists note that the distance between where the rocks came from and where they were used tended to grow over the million years in question. This indicates an increase in (1) planning ahead and (2) trade.
Trade is a somewhat advanced form of cooperation – cooperation between groups.
The earlier Paleolithic technologies were evidence of a degree of cooperation within the group of hunter gatherers. It took some level of coordination to hunt large mammals. Though Tomlinson does not go into it, today's Stone Age people are a model of how it is done. When the Kayapó Indians locate a herd of peccary, one or two Indians will remain in place while the rest circle around downwind and set up an ambush hiding behind trees. When all is in place, the first couple will stampede the peccary, which follow game trails past the trees to where the others kill them with clubs.
This kind of cooperative behavior was obviously required to drive mammoths into box canyon and kill zones or over cliffs. Such cooperation requires shared attention – focus on the prey – and a theory of mind – what the others are thinking.
This cooperation also required trust and some deferred gratification. Rather than setting up on the carcass and pushing one another aside to devour it raw, some members of the group would occupy themselves sharpening stones, others perhaps dismembering the kill and carrying it away, and yet others preparing a cooking fire and watching the children. By working together all would eat, and eat better, than if it were every man for himself. Or, as Leroi-Gourhan would have had it, sauve qui peut.
Tomlinson and all the experts he cites concur that this was done without symbolic language as we know it. The hominins would have communicated by sound and gesture. Increased levels of cooperation would have increased the amount of information to be conveyed, leading to refinements in sound production and gesture.
Evolution must be seen as a continual process, with each intermediate step providing some benefit. Qualitative rather than quantitative changes, such as the advent of theory of mind or the switch from analog-to-digital and speech and music, demand explanation.
Theory of mind – one mind perceiving what is going on another – may have been presaged by the discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys. Researchers in the nineties noticed that one monkey observing another monkey performing an action triggered the same neurons as would've been activated had the monkey himself performed the action. One mind is able to appreciate what the other is doing.
Thus, for instance, one hominin could picture what another was thinking in forming a stone tool or butchering some prey.
Here we come up against another of Tomlinson's frequently used words – diectic. It means situational. Over the million years in question, hominins became less focused on their immediate context and better able to generalize and anticipate. Instead of sharpening stones for this kill, they might carry around sharpened stones anticipating a kill. Instead of cooperating this time, they would anticipate ongoing cooperation. Thus, their actions and cooperation would be less and less ad hoc and more and more planned.
Practice and training are uniquely human traits. Humans practice throwing stones and spears. Leopards don't practice ambushing antelope – they just do it. Practice entails thinking at a distance, envisioning a scenario that is not immediately at hand.
In the chapter on the Neanderthals, Tomlinson notes the parallels in the development of the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Whether they were distinct species are not, their intellectual and cultural development paralleled each other and increasing sophistication.
He focuses on the Lavallier stone production by both groups in the period around three hundred thousand years ago. Chipping stones that proceeded from a haphazard, at approximately two one that was clearly preplanned and systematically undertaken.
The raw materials, workable stones, were transported over longer and longer distances. This implies purpose, preplanning. It may as well imply treat among groups.
The manufacturing process went by steps. The first was to knock edges off of a smooth stone to achieve the right outline. Knocking off the sides resulted in a regularly shaped core.
At that point the direction of the blows, and quite likely the instruments used to make them, changed to sidewise. The craftsman chipped off long thin bits in order to make a bilaterally symmetric sharp edged object.
The third step of manufacture appears to be one very well placed and powerful stroke to knock off a large flat sheet of stone, convex on one side from the long thin chips having been removed, and flat on the other.
Tomlinson notes by this technique a number of useful tools might be struck from the same stone. Robust choppers from the core, and sharp scrapers from the chips.
The Lavallier stone production described above represents nested hierarchies of operations. The first hierarchy is to produce the core, ship it into a convex shape, and break off a flat blade. Within each step of this hierarchy one can imagine crafting and shaping stones to use as fulcrums, supports and hammers; separate strokes for small and big chips; processes to further refine useful flakes produced by the chipping process.
Tomlinson uses the terms compositional and combinatorial; creating new elements and creating novel combinations of known elements.
Music also involves nested hierarchies. There are hierarchies of rhythm. Tomlinson doesn't name them so I will take a stab: the whole composition, stanzas, lines, measures and notes. These nested hierarchies will include repeating metrical elements.
The notes themselves follow hierarchies. There are the regularities of the total distances, octaves and fractions of octaves. There are overtones or harmonics, and predictable musical chords.
He returns frequently to the theme of tension and relaxation, upbeat and downbeat in music. I assume this will lead to the notion of resolution – giving a sense of completion to a piece of music. Anticipating a resolution, or a relaxation, implies expectations for the future. Future orientation, we have learned in the past few chapters, is a hallmark of a more evolved mind.
However far my characterization of music may be from the mark, one can see that the human animal was creating increasingly complex structures in his material environments. It is reasonable to assume, and there is evidence to support the hypothesis that he was doing so in the mental realm as well.
Tomlinson suggested shift from analog-to-digital. The elements are arranged in the stone tool making hierarchy were essentially digital – discrete operations being combined – rather than an analog process of simply striking with more force or from a somewhat different angle.
There was evidently an increasing level of cooperation among hominins during this proto-linguistic period. Though they did not possess language, there was more and more information to share, more activity to be coordinated. It obviously would've favored the evolution of more efficient modes of communication. This would have meant the discrete/digital/symbolic mode, and it would have applied equally to music as language.
And now the question of music. A musical tone is not a symbol. Music is not built of signs and symbols, yet it has structure, hierarchies of increasing complexity even though there is no meaning. It symbolizes nothing.
A recurring theme is that human evolutionary progress was offloaded from our genome into our culture. Progress no longer depended on changing genetics, and was therefore speeded up. In the process, human communications became freer, with our gesture calls no longer controlled genetically.
A similar thing happened in music. With the link between our verbal expressions and our genome weakened, we could leave it to culture to broaden the repertoire of musical noises we created.
Pitch is fundamental to music. The fundamental of a scale is more commonly a relative rather than absolute frequency. Once established, the relationship of the other notes falls in place.
The octave – doubling the frequency – appears to be universal. Subdivision of octaves into scales may differ from culture to culture, but it is systematic and quite universal.
Evolutionarily, the offloading of sound production from genetic control to cultural control made humans free to innovate with sound. We discovered that we liked intervals at which the harmonics make us comfortable: the musical fifth (3:2), fourth (4:3) and major third (5:4).
Though Tomlinson does not mention it, Robbins Burling, one of the authors he favors, deals with the chicken and egg problem. What came first? The ability to understand speech, or the ability to produce it? He makes a strong case for the former. Tomlinson might also ask whether the ability to perceive subtle differences in musical tone, preceded the ability to produce them.
Tomlinson notes that whereas in language, symbolic meaning became stronger as the symbols became more abstract, the opposite is true with music. Whatever indexical meanings tones may have had as animal calls were abstracted away during the development of music. Notes now carry no meaning.
Music and language evolved independently, simultaneously, and alongside humanoids' increasing ability to work with stones and other materials. All these cases entail nested hierarchies of discrete, repetitive steps. A general mental capacity for handling abstractions was applied to language, music, and our social and material existence.
See Comment 4 on Chapter 6, covering 100,000 to 20,000 years ago.
Though Tomlinson repeatedly rejects a Eurocentric account of the Neolithic Revolution, the sites that he refers to are mostly in Europe: Pyrenees, South France, the Danube Valley. He postulates that similar developments were taking place elsewhere but the archaeological evidence simply has yet to be found.
Tomlinson does not cite authors such as Luigi Cavalli Sforza and Spencer Wells who offer detailed maps of human expansion out of Africa. They put the split between North Asians and Europeans in the timeframe of 40,000 to 30,000 years ago. That is to say, that Europeans and Asians at that point in time were pretty much of a single gene pool, one which was already about 20,000 years distant from their African cousins.
Certainly a rapidly evolving culture was vastly important in transmitting technology and social behavior. However, it was supported by an equally rapidly evolving genome, one which led among other things to measurably larger brain cases among the North Asians and Europeans.
I have left the most important part of the book, the evolution of music, as a footnote. It is in comment two, below. The peculiar thing is that it is a footnote for Tomlinson as well. As noted above, the only musical instrument he describes at any length are the flutes found in European caves dating from 43,000 years ago. He makes no mention of specific percussion instruments, although they seem to date from much farther back, nor does he talk about panpipes, horns or stringed instruments.
As an alternative view of human evolution, and an exposition of the state of thinking among various specialists in the field, this is a valuable book. As an explanation of how the human animal came to make music it is not very elucidating. This being his field, Tomlinson is certainly presenting everything that is known. It is clear that we simply don't know that much.
I'm giving the book 3 stars. Five for his survey of human evolution, three for his treatment of music, the topic at hand, and three for the unnecessary obscurity of his language.
This book has at least two serious flaws. First of all, it does not talk much about music. A cursory perusal of the Internet produced more information on the history of music and musical instruments. My review of what he writes about the history of music is mostly in my comment 3, below. Secondly, the book is written in extremely difficult prose, as I explain in comment 1 below.
Looking at it as a novel perspective on human evolution, it is valuable. The musicologist Tomlinson takes exception to almost every expert who has written on the subject and produces some valuable insights.
Accentuating the positive, I am putting my caveats about its shortcomings into the first few comments on this review.
Though the subject of the book is music, it is dedicated almost exclusively to human evolution over the million year period under discussion. He assumes some familiarity with the forms of extinct hominins. I include a catalog as comment 2.
Tomlinson has a deep familiarity with the experts who have worked in these various disciplines. He finds that each breed of specialist tends to interpret human evolution through the lens of his own specialty. As none of these disciplines can claim Tomlinson, a musicologist, he has the freedom to assess the insights available from each. This book is a comprehensive and useful compilation of such insights.
Linguists point out that language involves a kind of digital signaling, in which words are divided into phonemes, discrete sounds with no intrinsic meaning, only arbitrarily assigned symbolic meanings depending on how they are used in combination. Animal sounds, on the other hand, tend to be analog. The degree of a cat's comfort or discomfort is expressed by the volume of his purr or yowl.
In speaking, however, pitch is analog. It does not carry discrete meaning. A woman may pitch her voice higher when talking sweetly to a baby or angrily to her husband.
Cadence is likewise analog in speech. Different people speak in different cadences, and purposefully speaking slowly may, for instance, give gravity to the utterance.
Tomlinson points out that music has it the other way around. Pitch and cadence are discrete whereas the tonal quality is analog. A note is a note, whether played by a piano or a violin.
Not all qualities of language and music can be forced into this dichotomy. The digital qualities are fairly well defined, but there is a lot of room in the analog space for emotion in both language and music.
Building on this observation, Tomlinson looks into the evolutionary record for characteristics of minds required to produce either music or language. Inasmuch as far more study has been given to language and music, he naturally proceeds mostly from arguments put forth by scientists who have looked into the evolution of language.
Tomlinson points out that our human way of thinking has us asking end-directed questions such as "What is it for?" and "Why did they want to do this?" This is how humans think. We and execute plans we already have in mind. But animals don't plan – they just do. The early part of the book delves into the evolution of a mind capable of planning. There are several key concepts.
Shared attention is important. Two animals being focused on the same object, be it prey, a mate or a stone being worked, represents a major evolutionary jump.
Theory of mind is related. If one animal has a theory of what the other animal is thinking, they can anticipate what the other animal will do.
Cooperation grows out of shared attention and a theory of mind. Humans throughout the million years under consideration became increasingly good at group efforts, such as coordinated hunts for large mammals. I find Robbins Burling, upon whom Tomlinson leans heavily, gives a much more lucid explanation in "The Talking Ape."
Tomlinson points out that other animals such as chimpanzees and wolves also hunt in groups. Their hunting differs in that it is basically each individual seeking his own immediate self-interest. They do not differentiate roles to be taken in the hunt, nor is there any protocol for sharing the spoils. These forms of behavior require the kind of future-orientation that is generally beyond the intellectual capability of nonhuman animals.
The material culture of the hominins under discussion included stones and fire – these leave the most easily found traces – and sticks, skins, and other less durable organic artifacts. Tomlinson devotes a lot of attention to stones.
Humanoids first started intentionally breaking stones to use as tools about 2.6 million years ago. They would break a few chips off in order to get a sharp edge.
Acheulean stone tools, used from 1.7 million years ago up until the dawn of agriculture, involved more chipping and demonstrated a characteristic bilateral symmetry. Though they improved slowly through the eons, what is most remarkable is their stasis – the fact that the same designs remained in use for so long. Tomlinson infers a great deal about the mental state of prehistoric humanoids from these tools.
We moderns would wrongly assume that a hominin would go about making stone tools the way we would. He would
(1) Decide that he needed a tool, then
(2) Choose the stone to make the tool, then
(3) Make the tool, then
(4) Keep the tool until he needed it.
Tomlinson would call this sequence by the term, operative chain, or chaîne opératoire, coined by Frenchman Leroi-Gourhan in the nineteen sixties. However, he contends that the sequence described above involves considerably more abstraction, thinking-at-a-distance than those hominins were capable of. Their sequence might be:
(1) Kill something edible,
(2) Discover they need to cut it up,
(3) Scout around for a rock to cut it,
(4) Chip the rock to make it sharper, if necessary,
(5) Butcher the animal,
(6) Eat the animal and
(7) Throw the rock away.
This operative chain does not involve planning. It does involve mimetic learning – one hominin observing another to learn how to sharpen rocks.
Tomlinson attributes the fact that the sharpened stones displayed bilateral symmetry to cultural rather than aesthetic factors. They didn't plan it that way – they just did it that way.
Archaeologists note that the distance between where the rocks came from and where they were used tended to grow over the million years in question. This indicates an increase in (1) planning ahead and (2) trade.
Trade is a somewhat advanced form of cooperation – cooperation between groups.
The earlier Paleolithic technologies were evidence of a degree of cooperation within the group of hunter gatherers. It took some level of coordination to hunt large mammals. Though Tomlinson does not go into it, today's Stone Age people are a model of how it is done. When the Kayapó Indians locate a herd of peccary, one or two Indians will remain in place while the rest circle around downwind and set up an ambush hiding behind trees. When all is in place, the first couple will stampede the peccary, which follow game trails past the trees to where the others kill them with clubs.
This kind of cooperative behavior was obviously required to drive mammoths into box canyon and kill zones or over cliffs. Such cooperation requires shared attention – focus on the prey – and a theory of mind – what the others are thinking.
This cooperation also required trust and some deferred gratification. Rather than setting up on the carcass and pushing one another aside to devour it raw, some members of the group would occupy themselves sharpening stones, others perhaps dismembering the kill and carrying it away, and yet others preparing a cooking fire and watching the children. By working together all would eat, and eat better, than if it were every man for himself. Or, as Leroi-Gourhan would have had it, sauve qui peut.
Tomlinson and all the experts he cites concur that this was done without symbolic language as we know it. The hominins would have communicated by sound and gesture. Increased levels of cooperation would have increased the amount of information to be conveyed, leading to refinements in sound production and gesture.
Evolution must be seen as a continual process, with each intermediate step providing some benefit. Qualitative rather than quantitative changes, such as the advent of theory of mind or the switch from analog-to-digital and speech and music, demand explanation.
Theory of mind – one mind perceiving what is going on another – may have been presaged by the discovery of mirror neurons in monkeys. Researchers in the nineties noticed that one monkey observing another monkey performing an action triggered the same neurons as would've been activated had the monkey himself performed the action. One mind is able to appreciate what the other is doing.
Thus, for instance, one hominin could picture what another was thinking in forming a stone tool or butchering some prey.
Here we come up against another of Tomlinson's frequently used words – diectic. It means situational. Over the million years in question, hominins became less focused on their immediate context and better able to generalize and anticipate. Instead of sharpening stones for this kill, they might carry around sharpened stones anticipating a kill. Instead of cooperating this time, they would anticipate ongoing cooperation. Thus, their actions and cooperation would be less and less ad hoc and more and more planned.
Practice and training are uniquely human traits. Humans practice throwing stones and spears. Leopards don't practice ambushing antelope – they just do it. Practice entails thinking at a distance, envisioning a scenario that is not immediately at hand.
In the chapter on the Neanderthals, Tomlinson notes the parallels in the development of the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Whether they were distinct species are not, their intellectual and cultural development paralleled each other and increasing sophistication.
He focuses on the Lavallier stone production by both groups in the period around three hundred thousand years ago. Chipping stones that proceeded from a haphazard, at approximately two one that was clearly preplanned and systematically undertaken.
The raw materials, workable stones, were transported over longer and longer distances. This implies purpose, preplanning. It may as well imply treat among groups.
The manufacturing process went by steps. The first was to knock edges off of a smooth stone to achieve the right outline. Knocking off the sides resulted in a regularly shaped core.
At that point the direction of the blows, and quite likely the instruments used to make them, changed to sidewise. The craftsman chipped off long thin bits in order to make a bilaterally symmetric sharp edged object.
The third step of manufacture appears to be one very well placed and powerful stroke to knock off a large flat sheet of stone, convex on one side from the long thin chips having been removed, and flat on the other.
Tomlinson notes by this technique a number of useful tools might be struck from the same stone. Robust choppers from the core, and sharp scrapers from the chips.
The Lavallier stone production described above represents nested hierarchies of operations. The first hierarchy is to produce the core, ship it into a convex shape, and break off a flat blade. Within each step of this hierarchy one can imagine crafting and shaping stones to use as fulcrums, supports and hammers; separate strokes for small and big chips; processes to further refine useful flakes produced by the chipping process.
Tomlinson uses the terms compositional and combinatorial; creating new elements and creating novel combinations of known elements.
Music also involves nested hierarchies. There are hierarchies of rhythm. Tomlinson doesn't name them so I will take a stab: the whole composition, stanzas, lines, measures and notes. These nested hierarchies will include repeating metrical elements.
The notes themselves follow hierarchies. There are the regularities of the total distances, octaves and fractions of octaves. There are overtones or harmonics, and predictable musical chords.
He returns frequently to the theme of tension and relaxation, upbeat and downbeat in music. I assume this will lead to the notion of resolution – giving a sense of completion to a piece of music. Anticipating a resolution, or a relaxation, implies expectations for the future. Future orientation, we have learned in the past few chapters, is a hallmark of a more evolved mind.
However far my characterization of music may be from the mark, one can see that the human animal was creating increasingly complex structures in his material environments. It is reasonable to assume, and there is evidence to support the hypothesis that he was doing so in the mental realm as well.
Tomlinson suggested shift from analog-to-digital. The elements are arranged in the stone tool making hierarchy were essentially digital – discrete operations being combined – rather than an analog process of simply striking with more force or from a somewhat different angle.
There was evidently an increasing level of cooperation among hominins during this proto-linguistic period. Though they did not possess language, there was more and more information to share, more activity to be coordinated. It obviously would've favored the evolution of more efficient modes of communication. This would have meant the discrete/digital/symbolic mode, and it would have applied equally to music as language.
And now the question of music. A musical tone is not a symbol. Music is not built of signs and symbols, yet it has structure, hierarchies of increasing complexity even though there is no meaning. It symbolizes nothing.
A recurring theme is that human evolutionary progress was offloaded from our genome into our culture. Progress no longer depended on changing genetics, and was therefore speeded up. In the process, human communications became freer, with our gesture calls no longer controlled genetically.
A similar thing happened in music. With the link between our verbal expressions and our genome weakened, we could leave it to culture to broaden the repertoire of musical noises we created.
Pitch is fundamental to music. The fundamental of a scale is more commonly a relative rather than absolute frequency. Once established, the relationship of the other notes falls in place.
The octave – doubling the frequency – appears to be universal. Subdivision of octaves into scales may differ from culture to culture, but it is systematic and quite universal.
Evolutionarily, the offloading of sound production from genetic control to cultural control made humans free to innovate with sound. We discovered that we liked intervals at which the harmonics make us comfortable: the musical fifth (3:2), fourth (4:3) and major third (5:4).
Though Tomlinson does not mention it, Robbins Burling, one of the authors he favors, deals with the chicken and egg problem. What came first? The ability to understand speech, or the ability to produce it? He makes a strong case for the former. Tomlinson might also ask whether the ability to perceive subtle differences in musical tone, preceded the ability to produce them.
Tomlinson notes that whereas in language, symbolic meaning became stronger as the symbols became more abstract, the opposite is true with music. Whatever indexical meanings tones may have had as animal calls were abstracted away during the development of music. Notes now carry no meaning.
Music and language evolved independently, simultaneously, and alongside humanoids' increasing ability to work with stones and other materials. All these cases entail nested hierarchies of discrete, repetitive steps. A general mental capacity for handling abstractions was applied to language, music, and our social and material existence.
See Comment 4 on Chapter 6, covering 100,000 to 20,000 years ago.
Though Tomlinson repeatedly rejects a Eurocentric account of the Neolithic Revolution, the sites that he refers to are mostly in Europe: Pyrenees, South France, the Danube Valley. He postulates that similar developments were taking place elsewhere but the archaeological evidence simply has yet to be found.
Tomlinson does not cite authors such as Luigi Cavalli Sforza and Spencer Wells who offer detailed maps of human expansion out of Africa. They put the split between North Asians and Europeans in the timeframe of 40,000 to 30,000 years ago. That is to say, that Europeans and Asians at that point in time were pretty much of a single gene pool, one which was already about 20,000 years distant from their African cousins.
Certainly a rapidly evolving culture was vastly important in transmitting technology and social behavior. However, it was supported by an equally rapidly evolving genome, one which led among other things to measurably larger brain cases among the North Asians and Europeans.
I have left the most important part of the book, the evolution of music, as a footnote. It is in comment two, below. The peculiar thing is that it is a footnote for Tomlinson as well. As noted above, the only musical instrument he describes at any length are the flutes found in European caves dating from 43,000 years ago. He makes no mention of specific percussion instruments, although they seem to date from much farther back, nor does he talk about panpipes, horns or stringed instruments.
As an alternative view of human evolution, and an exposition of the state of thinking among various specialists in the field, this is a valuable book. As an explanation of how the human animal came to make music it is not very elucidating. This being his field, Tomlinson is certainly presenting everything that is known. It is clear that we simply don't know that much.
I'm giving the book 3 stars. Five for his survey of human evolution, three for his treatment of music, the topic at hand, and three for the unnecessary obscurity of his language.
December 20, 2020
One of the best books I have read all year.
I had to read this for post-graduate research. The hypothesis is convincing and bonds you to a more visceral, and primordial connection to music as a biological necessity; a dialectical opposition to the more often attribution of aesthetic appreciation of forms and symmetry’s. With such a reading the symmetry seems to be a serendipitous discovery, or a forced reading when enlightenment ideals came to reflect themself in the Viennese classism of German traditions.
It is one of those texts one would feel compelled to return to time and again to ponder what other responses might be cultivated toward the music we interact with every day.
I had to read this for post-graduate research. The hypothesis is convincing and bonds you to a more visceral, and primordial connection to music as a biological necessity; a dialectical opposition to the more often attribution of aesthetic appreciation of forms and symmetry’s. With such a reading the symmetry seems to be a serendipitous discovery, or a forced reading when enlightenment ideals came to reflect themself in the Viennese classism of German traditions.
It is one of those texts one would feel compelled to return to time and again to ponder what other responses might be cultivated toward the music we interact with every day.
June 1, 2015
This book's subtitle really should be the title. It's much less about music and much more about the general emergence of human modernity, which the author wishes to dive into in order to describe the emergence of music.
As an undergraduate, the book was challenging but also quite clear and relatively understandable. He presents his ideas well, typically defines his terms in a clear manner, and does not assume a large amount of outside knowledge for most of the book except when he gets a little excited when discussing other peoples' work.
I personally felt like his model was a little too emergent-ist, though I did like the way he thinks.
As an undergraduate, the book was challenging but also quite clear and relatively understandable. He presents his ideas well, typically defines his terms in a clear manner, and does not assume a large amount of outside knowledge for most of the book except when he gets a little excited when discussing other peoples' work.
I personally felt like his model was a little too emergent-ist, though I did like the way he thinks.
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