A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity by Gary Tomlinson (review)

Why start the inquiry one million years ago? Some fifty-five years ago Jacques Chailley chose a much shorter time span in his book 40,000 ans de musique: L’homme à la découverte de la musique (Paris: Plon, 1961). At that time, Homo sapiens was assumed not to date much further back. But much has been learned since then, and Tomlinson starts his musical clock when the first stone tools appeared. These Acheulean cleavers and hand axes set hominins on an evolutionary path, which eventually led to music about 900,000 years later. It was a long period during which human faculties adapted to music.

The last half-century has seen much progress in evolutionary studies in academic fields such as archaeology, paleoanthropology, cognitive neuroscience, music cognition, ethology, primatology, linguistics, and semiotics. Tomlinson cuts a fascinating path through these quickly expanding scholarly fields and ably guides us through the thicket. His list of references is exhaustive and relevant. The account is based on the Darwinian principle of selection-with-variation, which has become the agreed path for evolutionary studies in general. It is good to see it integrated into the study of music. According to Tomlinson this biological approach needs to be combined with a measure of cultural behavior. Otherwise the procedure may boil down to a simple contest of nature vs. nurture, which would be “at best misleading, [and] at worst utterly distorting in the analysis of just about everything interesting that humans are up to” (p. 13). In his view music emerged in a “biocultural coevolution.”

There are seven chapters. Each deals with a central idea and is tied to a broad time slot. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of feedback. As in circuit theory, feedback can be positive or negative, giving an enhancing or a repressive effect. In an organism, the feedback occurs when it modifies the environment, and the organism reacts to the new situation. The positive feedback is tied to phenomena Tomlinson calls epicycles—unfortunately, not clearly defined in the book. (To be sure, they are unrelated to the astronomical epicycles made famous by Ptolemy in the second century A.D.)

The Acheulean stone tools (mentioned earlier) are dealt with in chapter 2 (“1,000,000 Years Ago”). They date between 1.8 and 0.1 million years before present. Already the earliest ones have quite symmetric shapes, a design choice conforming to later hominin preference.

Chapter 3 (“500,000 Years Ago”) discusses proto-discourse through vocalization and gesture but without language. It is needed to establish coordination and build complexity from simple foundations. Here Tomlinson reviews features that nourished the social brain, such as the advantage of living in groups and cooperating in hunting. This allows hominins to hunt and outwit megafauna. In turn, the food nurtured the brain. The ability to organize large groups favored the social brain.

Chapter 4 (“250,000 Years Ago”): hierarchical thinking was probably introduced at this stage. It preceded the conception of proper language, when vocabularies and grammars were established. By establishing hierarchical structures, vocabularies could be reduced to manageable size and sorted into categories. With these techniques, human memories could more easily cope with large vocabularies. By inventing grammatical rules, many sentences could be formed on similar patterns, making them easier to construct and understand. Such techniques were also useful in developing music, which involved similar hierarchical concepts. Using recursive patterns, short melodic phrases could be expanded into longer ones. Rhythmic phrases, too, could be lengthened through repetition. Abstraction lay near at hand, and societal concepts, such as kinship and religion, may have appeared at this stage.

In chapter 5 (“100,000 Years Ago”) symbolic cognition followed as an outgrowth of abstraction. Ability to handle symbolic representations is often seen as a dividing line between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens).

Extant flutes are discussed in chapter 7 (“100,000...