Humans have a sound and gestural repertoire analogous to that of chimpanzees but in addition have developed three other modes of social communication. These are very relevant to understanding the evolution of religious behavior, which makes use of all three. They are dance, music, and language.
Dance and music should in many respects be considered together because, in many cultures, they seem to be inseparable. Both are found universally. Among hunter gatherers, one cannot dance without music, and if there is music there is dance. Some cultures use the same word for both. Among the Blackfoot Indians the principal word for music, saapup, means singing, dance and ceremony all rolled into one.78 The ancient Greek word mousikē, from which the English word music is derived, means any art over which the Muses presided, hence included dance, music and recited poetry.
Even the Taliban, who banned most forms of music in Afghanistan, allowed men to sing a cappella.79 Music and dancing give participants a vigorous sense of community. The shared emotions evoked by the rhythmic activity create feelings of exaltation that bind the group to a common purpose. The origin of music has long been mysterious, but its social role, as a pillar of ritual, may have been the reason that natural selection has made sensitivity to music a universal property of the mind.
Both dance and music are very social activities and underlying their social nature is a simple behavior we take for granted but which no other primate possesses. People in groups can synchronize their movements, whether in stamping or clapping or any other rhythmic sound-making activity, and do so spontaneously. Chimpanzees have never been observed to synchronize their calls or drumming, and there is only one report of bonobos in captivity doing so.
The ability to synchronize dance and music would have been of great value to human groups, given the role of sustained rhythmic movement in promoting cohesion. Therefore it would seem to be an adaptive behavior, meaning one shaped by natural selection because of the survival advantage it conferred. But this raises a wider question, that of whether music itself is adaptive.
It was obvious to Darwin that music, being a universal behavior of all known human societies, should be considered as having been shaped by natural selection. But what selective advantage did it confer, given that its only function seemed to be that of giving pleasure? “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life,” Darwin wrote in a well-known passage, “they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.”80
Curiously, Darwin as a young man witnessed an event that could have suggested to him how music had come to play so essential a role in human existence. In 1836, when his ship the Beagle stopped in King George’s Sound in southwest Australia, he attended an aboriginal rite. From his description, it seems evident that the performance was an enactment of an event in the Aborigines’ dreamtime mythology. But ethnographers had not at that stage appreciated Aborigine religious ideas, and barely understood that they had any religion at all. Then as now, as Barbara Ehrenreich argues in her book Dancing in the Streets, the practice of attaining collective emotional bonding through dancing was unfamiliar to Western observers. With their emphasis on self-control and the psychology of the individual, they viewed with incomprehension and horror the wild dance rituals of the primitive peoples with whom their colonial administrations came in contact, and particularly the trances into which the dancers often fell. “Western psychology was disabled from comprehending the phenomenon of collective ecstasy,” Ehrenreich writes, in part because anything that required the loss of self was regarded as pathological.81
Darwin, not yet the destroyer of Victorian certitudes, saw only a rite he could not understand, two totemic clans performing the emu dance. “When both tribes mingled in the dance, the ground trembled with the heaviness of their steps, and the air resounded with their wild cries,” he wrote. “Every one appeared in high spirits, and the group of nearly naked figures, viewed by the light of the blazing fires, all moving in hideous harmony, formed a perfect display of a festival among the lowest barbarians.”82
Writing his Descent of Man thirty-five years later, Darwin neglected to wonder if the “hideous harmony” might have offered some insight into the origin of music. A major purpose of his book was to advance the idea of sexual selection—that the choice of males by females and the competition for females between males were far reaching forms of natural selection. It was sexual selection—the singing of men and women to impress one another in courtship—that he proposed as the driving force of human music.
Song has evolved many times independently among vertebrate species—in songbirds, parrots, hummingbirds, whales and seals, as well as primates. Singing doesn’t necessarily have the same purpose in all these species. In some, such as whales, it seems to have arisen for reasons of communication. In birds, song may be a way of defending a territory or to attract a mate. Noting the song of gibbons, which perform very impressive duets, Darwin wrote that “it appears probable that the progenitors of man, either the males or females or both sexes, before acquiring the power of expressing their love in articulate language, endeavored to charm each other with musical notes and rhythm.”83
Darwin’s thoughts on the origins of music are the starting point for many discussions today because his insights were keen and biologists are further than ever from agreeing on whether music has an evolutionary purpose.
Steven Pinker, for instance, says music shows clear signs of not being an adaptation, meaning it was not shaped by natural selection. “I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties,” he writes.84 Obviously the liking for cheesecake confers no survival advantage that might allow genes for cheesecake consumption to become more common through natural selection. What has happened, Pinker argues, is that a liking for fat and for rare sources of sweetness like honeycombs conferred a survival benefit on our foraging ancestors, and cheesecake happens to stimulate the taste and odor detection systems that evolved for that purpose.
Pinker’s argument is that the love of music too is an accidental by-product of faculties that exist for different purposes. Music may trick the language system into thinking there is meaning in some string of notes, or hit the auditory system with natural resonances it is primed to focus on for other reasons, Pinker suggests. But this argument seems like examining each part of an elephant in isolation and dismissing each as pointless, without asking what they might all do together.
In fact, there are substantial reasons to suppose that music is adaptive. It is found in every known society, a strong indication of being shaped by natural selection. And the faculty of music perception is acquired very easily, like learning a language, and at a very early age. Sandra Trehub, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, has found that babies as young as 6 months have advanced musical abilities, being able to tell the difference between a changed melody and one that has merely been shifted by some musical interval. “The rudiments of music listening are gifts of nature rather than products of culture,” she concludes.85
So why did nature confer this gift? Two leading proposals are sexual selection, which was Darwin’s choice, and group cohesion. The sexual selection theory has been ingeniously developed by the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller. He notes that musical ability is an excellent indicator of the brain’s fitness. So women may have preferred men with good musical abilities as the fathers of their children, leading to the genes underlying the faculty becoming more common. The rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix, Miller writes, “did have sexual liaisons with hundreds of groupies, maintained parallel long-term relationships with at least two women, and fathered at least three children in the United States, Germany and Sweden.”86
Miller rejects the idea that music conferred an advantage by bonding people; such an approach, he argues, depends on group selection, and group selection is a grisly matter of one
group wiping out another: “Group selection models of music evolution are not just stories of warm, cuddly bonding within a group; they must also be stories of those warm, cuddly groups out-competing and exterminating other groups that do not spend so much time dancing around their campfires.”87
This of course is an irrelevant argument because moral or political preferences have no place in trying to understand the evolutionary process. But Miller’s politically tinged objection may well explain part of the resistance of other academic researchers to the idea of group selection. Group selection does indeed assume that some groups survive at the expense of others. The evidence of frequent warfare between hunter gatherer groups suggests that just this kind of pressure has operated throughout the human past, and was at least as intense among foraging peoples as among their descendants who adapted to settled life.
Could sexual selection have been the driving force behind the emergence of the human appreciation of music, as Miller argues? It may have played some role: male musicians seem not to lack for young female admirers, though whether they in fact father more children has yet to be proved. But sexual selection seems unlikely to have been a major force in shaping the music faculty because most features shaped by sexual selection are highly dimorphic, meaning that they differ between male and female. The peacock has a gorgeous, iridescent tail; the peahen is drab and dowdy. Male deer have elaborate antlers; the females of most species do not. The appreciation of music, however, is not at all dimorphic; both men and women seem equally skilled. In terms of generating music, there may be more male than female rock stars, but this affects a handful of people, not the population as a whole. “Based on current data, the assumption that music is a sexually selected trait complex is unjustified,” concludes Tecumseh Fitch, a psychologist at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, in a recent review.88
The highly social nature of music, notably the fact that it is performed for others to listen to, seems the strongest clue to its purpose, or at the least one that no theory can ignore. True, drawing people together for a feel-good jam session may not seem to carry any overwhelming survival advantage. But it is probably an error to consider music in isolation from the context in which it is played. The context relevant for its evolution is not the modern concert hall but the hunter gatherer societies in which music first came to prominence.
Music, particularly that made with percussive instruments like drums, rattles and bells, is in evidence at many ordinary social occasions, such as healing, hunting, warfare and funerals, observes the social anthropologist Rodney Needham. “Percussion,” he adds, “is typical of a remarkably wide range of other situations such as birth, initiation, marriage, accession to office, sacrifice, lunar rites, calendrical feats, declaration of war, the return of head-hunters, the reception of strangers, the inauguration of a house or a communal building, market days, sowing, harvest, fishing expeditions, epidemics, eclipses, and so on.” All these events, he notes, mark transitions from one state to another. And percussion is the constant accompaniment of these important ritual occasions.89
Among hunter gatherers, music is inseparable from two other behaviors. First, where there is music, there is dance. Second, where there is dance and music, there is ritual. In this context, it is clear why music confers an advantage in survival: it is an essential component of religious behavior, the catalyst of social cohesion.
Besides music and dance, two other components of ancient religious behavior remain to be examined—language and trance.
Music, Language and Belief
Modern religions like Judaism or Christianity emphasize creeds and intellectual belief over rituals and emotional engagement. Language is essential for expressing religious concepts, but it may be less so for engaging in rituals, where chants or wordless songs would often suffice. For example the n/um songs sung by the !Kung people of the Kalahari at their principal ritual “have titles but few if any words,” the anthropologist Lorna Marshall reports.90 One of their best songs, meaning that it could cure any sickness according to the !Kung, is called the =Kowa Ts’i N!a, which means Giraffe Song Great. But the lyrics are short on specific meaning, being mostly a string of vowels and nonsense syllables. (The odd punctuation marks represent various kinds of clicks in the !Kung language.)
It seems possible, therefore, that there could have been aproto-religion that developed before language, or at least before language had assumed its present degree of articulacy. This proto-religion, even though based on dance, music, and wordless chants, could have been effective enough at securing group cohesion and coordination and therefore, to the extent it promoted the group’s survival, would have been favored by group selection.
The evolution of language is a rich and complex subject which linguists have largely avoided and on which other experts have reached little agreement. But it seems more than likely that the context in which language evolved was affected by dance, music and religion, the other systems of communication that were emerging in our distant ancestors. These four kinds of social communicative behavior may in some way have coevolved.
The details of this complex four-way interaction are entirely unknown, though they may one day come to light as the genes underlying the relevant neural circuits are identified. The evolutionary processes that brought each faculty to birth would have lasted over many generations and probably overlapped extensively.
Dance, being mostly just rhythmic movement, seems the most ancient. Music too would seem to reach far back in the human lineage, given that its rudiments can be seen in the singing of other primates. Because dance and music are inseparable in primitive cultures, it seems likely they coevolved, soon being joined by the first forms of religious behavior.
A new version of a gene may take many generations to sweep through a population, though fewer generations are needed if the population is small or the selective advantage very great. Complex behaviors like music perception presumably depend on a large number of genes to set up the appropriate neural circuitry, so several hundreds or thousands of years may be required to put such faculties in place. The evolution of behaviors like dance, music and religion would have taken many generations, with considerable opportunity for improvements in one form of communication to spur greater sophistication in the others.
So where does language fit in? Many observers from Darwin onward have noted the similarities between music and language. Both require the generation and perception of sound. Both have the essential quality of recursiveness, that of being able to embed one phrase within another. Both are vehicles of communication, even though music communicates principally at the emotional level. Darwin suggested that music was in some way a precursor of language. “We must suppose that the rhythms and cadences of oratory are derived from previously developed musical powers,” he wrote. “We can thus understand how it is that music, dancing, song, and poetry are such very ancient arts. We may go even further than this and ... believe that musical sounds afforded one of the bases for the development of language.”91
In support of Darwin’s idea, there is wide variation in people’s musical abilities, but everyone speaks with much the same degree of competence. From the geneticist’s perspective, this is a sign that language is under tight selection, meaning that any genes that degrade or disrupt it are quickly eliminated from the population. Music, in contrast, being evolution’s first attempt at a human auditory communications system and now no longer essential for that purpose, is free of exacting constraints on its perception and production and so can absorb considerable genetic variation.92
Also favoring the view that music is more ancient than language is the fact that it speaks more strongly to the emotions than to the mind’s purely cognitive faculties.
If language provides a powerful enhancement of ritual but is not in fact essential to it, as argued above, then it was perhaps a latecomer to the emerging complex of behaviors that underlie religion. This raises the interesting possibility that language in fact emerged in the cont
ext of ritual. Language is so powerful that if it had evolved early, it would surely have dominated religious behavior. The fact that it seems to have been almost an optional ingredient in the mix suggests it was a late arrival. So a tentative sequence of events would be 1) dance, 2) music, 3) proto-religion based on ritual, 4) language, 5) religion based on shared beliefs about the supernatural. In such a staging there would doubtless have been copious overlaps between the evolutionary initiation and completion of each faculty.
The archaeological record at present holds little evidence to help set dates on the emergence of music, language and religion, all of which must have been in place before the modern human exodus from the African homeland 50,000 years ago. The oldest known musical instruments are a pair of flutes, made from the wing bones of a swan. Found in Geissenkloesterle in Germany, they are some 36,000 years old. This is a minimum age for instrumental music, which is presumably far older. Instruments like drums and rattles are made of perishable materials that leave no trace in the archaeological record. Authorities generally agree that the oldest musical instrument of all is the human voice, and it seems likely that song predated language.
There is one significant clue to the date of language, and that is the exodus of modern humans from Africa. Their behavior, as judged by their appearance in Europe fairly shortly afterward, is far more sophisticated than that of the anatomically modern humans who started to appear in the archaeological record some 200,000 years ago. It looks as though some neural development has brought about a quantum leap in their cognitive powers. Since few faculties could be of greater value to a social species than language, it seems possible that language, although it must have been generations in development, did not attain its modern form until 50,000 years ago, and that this development was what allowed behaviorally modern humans to break out of Africa, escaping the encircling Neanderthals who had long penned them into their ancestral homeland.93 If this scenario is correct, then language would have been perfected as the last in a series of communicative behaviors.
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