By Alan Harvey, University of Western Australia

Christine Westerback/Creative Commons

All human cultures and social groups that we know of respond to music and dance. The type of music may vary but the underlying, fundamental principles of making music are the same.

Our recognition of, and emotional responses to, pleasant and unpleasant music seems to be universal, expressed even in very young infants and seemingly independent of our cultural upbringing.

So what exactly is music for? Why is it a universal that can profoundly affect people, why is it such an essential part of our lives?

Music is a form of communication which is different from language. In humans, music stimulates emotions and elicits autonomic and physiological responses. It entrains neural activity and is inextricably linked to movement and dance.

Music facilitates interactions within groups and can create common arousal states. It helps to provide cohesion and organisation to our social architecture.

Throughout recorded history, leaders – whether of nations, political parties or religious denominations – have understood the power of music to influence populations.

In recent times, researchers have shown that music structures time and provides mnemonic frameworks that aid learning and memory, help organise knowledge. Many of us can remember the lyrics of songs for example, but may not remember much, if any prose.

Attaching words to music somehow makes the words easier to memorise. Yet despite all of this, the impact of music remains mysterious: it does not seem to do anything, it does not transmit data and information in the same way as language/speech.

For many, the evolution of language in Homo sapiens is a unique event that is linked to the evolution of the cognitively modern mind. What then is the relationship between music and language, and to what extent are they dependent or independent of each other?

Human Brain [MRI Scan]
taod/Creative Commons

Our brains are known to be wired to process both forms of communication, but from an evolutionary point of view did music come before language, or vice versa, or was there a common precursor that somehow separated into two systems when Homo sapiens evolved, with both types of communication retained?

Was music an important element that contributed to the early well-being of our species? What, if any, advantages did music give to Homo sapiens from an evolutionary perspective as our founders migrated out of east Africa to colonise the planet?

Why does music continue to exist alongside language and remain important to all human cultures, thousands of generations after the founders of our species evolved?

Modern neuroscience research, especially using new imaging techniques such as positron emission tomography (PET) and functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) confirms that the processing of music has a consistent structural foundation in the human brain.

It has been known for some time that, in right-handed individuals, language is mostly processed in the left cerebral hemisphere while many aspects of music involve right hemisphere activity.

But new imaging data have revealed even more complex circuitries involved in music and language processing. Numerous regions of the brain are integrated into networks that subserve music or language processing and analysis, but the neuroimaging data also show that separation of these processing streams is by no means complete.

For example, there is overlap in brain areas that process the emotional (prosodic) aspects of music and speech, and studies have shown that musical training results in a shift towards processing in the left cerebral hemisphere.

As research continues, more is learned about how music-related circuits differ from, or overlap with, other pathways involved in cognitive and emotional processing. For example, brain areas associated with positive responses to music overlap with networks associated with reward behaviours, subjective experiences and acts of social cooperation.

In close association with the evolution of the modern mind, I believe music was of critical importance to our early ancestors; increased fitness and reproductive advantage of a group is gained not only by an individual’s success but also if cooperative behaviours benefit other members of the group, and importantly for our ancestors these benefits extended to others who were not necessarily genetically related.

For most people, music therapy remains a branch of “alternative” medicine, something outside the mainstream. But recent research suggests that it is time that this attitude was changed.

For example, training in music has measurable effects on brain plasticity and can influence learning ability during development. Music also seems to have mnemonic powers, activating circuits in the brain that are linked to aspects of memory processing.

There are also structural changes in developing brains associated with early musical training, and exposure to music seems to have beneficial effects on children suffering from developmental disorders such as autism and Williams syndrome.

In adults, many studies have shown that music used with physical therapy improves motor control and coordination, with benefits for rehabilitation after injury or in degenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s disease.

Music therapy may also improve memory recall and social awareness in Alzheimer’s patients and recent studies on stroke patients have shown that controlled exposure to music improves cognitive function, increases motivation and awareness, and enhances positive mood states.

Taken together, the evidence suggests that music remains just as essential to Homo sapiens now as it was 70,000-80,000 years ago. It continues to be important for development of our children, for our health and for our overall sense of mental well-being.

Above all, music is perhaps the primary medium which enables individual members of the species Homo sapiens to forget their mortal vulnerability and come together as a collective group to share and enjoy common physiological and emotional experiences.

About the Author

Alan Harvey was educated at the University of Cambridge and Australian National University. He is currently Professor and Deputy Head of the School of Anatomy and Human Biology. He has the long-term ambition of bringing his neuroscience and musical interests together, intending to write a book about the role of music in human evolution and modern-day society.

Alan Harvey receives funding from the NHMRC, ARC and WA Neurotrauma Research Program.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

By Iain Davidson, University of New England

Media commentators have been eager to paint Neanderthals as artists - but why?

An article published recently in Science sheds new light on paintings found in 11 cave sites in Spain. At 40,800 years old, some of these paintings could be among the oldest anywhere in the world.
But were these paintings done by Neandertals or the modern humans who replaced them? From the headlines you would think it was the Neandertals.

Taken together with other recent publications, summarised in the image of Google search results below, the Spanish results suggest the habit of producing art in various forms went back to the earliest appearance of modern humans in Europe.

This is only about 5,000 or 10,000 years after people also reached Australia. Why then did the media grab the idea that the paintings might have been made by Neandertals, who were replaced by these artistic modern humans in Europe?

Google Search Results
Google

Recent improvements in radiocarbon dating have shown modern humans were in southern England more than 41,500 years ago, that people left flutes and figurines in Swabia more than 38,000 years ago, engravings in the Dordogne region about 36,500 years ago, and paintings around 35,000 years ago at Chauvet Cave, west of the Rhone valley.

Taken together there is now no doubt there were distinct types of art in Europe close to 40,000 years old, and generally not associated with Neandertals.

Yet the headlines on at least four continents relating to the new Spanish results asserted that Neandertals could have been responsible for the art.

The big split

Neandertals became distinct from modern humans about 350,000 years ago but died out within a few thousand years (at most) of the arrival of modern humans.

They produced very little (if anything) in the way of art, but modern humans in Europe went on to produce several different forms of art over most of the next 30,000 years. In Australia, art may have arrived with the first people and was certainly being produced by different Aboriginal groups into the 20th century.

The media coverage of the latest Spanish results is all the more surprising given it relies on a throwaway line at the end of the Science paper on the Spanish cave art dating: “it cannot be ruled out that the earliest paintings were symbolic expressions of the Neandertals”, though no evidence is produced.

Remains of the day

Neandertal remains were first discovered in 1829, 30 years before the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, but it was not until five years later that anyone suggested they were a different species from ourselves. The status of Neandertals has been the subject of varying interpretations, like the more recently discovered Homo floresiensis.

Interpretations of fossils and their relationships to us are not easy and, where Neandertals are concerned, they depend more than we would like to admit on attitudes that are often not expressed.

First reconstruction of Neanderthal Man, 1888
Wikimedia

The most famous example is the suggestion in 1957, by the anatomists William Straus and AJ Cave, that a Neandertal wearing modern clothes would look no different from other passengers on the New York Subway. It is difficult to decide whether this is a compliment to Neandertals, or not.

There are some substantial reasons why it’s difficult to get a full picture of Neandertals. A pattern was described in the 19th century that Neandertals made stone tools using flakes that archaeologists called Mousterian, and did not make bone tools, art or ornaments.

Following them, modern humans made stone tools using parallel-sided blades that were rare earlier, and did make bone tools, art and ornaments. Scholars and the general public lined up with the view that people like us replaced people who were not like us.

But as is to be expected, the story is not quite as neat. The earliest paint has been found in South Africa dated to 100,000 years ago, far away from Neandertals and long before modern humans in Europe.

Recent discoveries tend to suggest more overlap between the species in stone and bone tools, art and ornaments. But against this, there have been very few dated fossils and early attempts to provide dates were distorted by the fact that the supposed transition between Neandertals and modern humans occurred at about the period when radiocarbon dating ceases to be useful.

Neanderthals and Humans
KRT/AAP

Close scrutiny sometimes shows, as here, that evidence showing modern behaviour among Neandertals is thin, so why did one journalist – according to a colleague of mine who was interviewed about the Spanish cave art – say he “really, really wanted" to write a story that Neandertals created the art? Why did so many news outlets happily rush to this same, somewhat flawed, conclusion?

The reasons lie partly in our ambivalent relations with creatures that are like us but not quite the same. Perhaps the most obvious are dogs, which are like us because they attend assiduously to our blandishments, or bears which can have a similar body plan and proportion, yet are dangerous, so we infantilise them as teddy bears.

And then there are imaginary creatures such as yetis, hobbits, trolls, and gods, invented to remind us where the boundaries of humanity lie.

Perhaps the media’s fascination arises from the fact archaeologists and biological anthropologists are testing which side of that boundary Neandertals lie.

About the Author

Iain completed his Ph.D at Cambridge based on Spanish Palaeolithic fauna and economy, and has since carried out research and publication on the Spanish Palaeolithic and on Australian prehistory. He has published extensively on the archaeology of language origins. He conducts research on all aspects of archaeology including painted caves in Northwestern Queensland and consultancy in Queensland, N.S.W. and Western Australia. His current research interests include rock art and the narrative of Australian archaeology.

Iain Davidson has received funding from the ARC, AIATSIS, and AINSE. He has conducted archaeological research on Spanish cave art. He is affiliated with the University of New England, Flinders University, University of Queensland and Harvard University.

This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.