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

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Fear not, dear reader. I'm not making the sounds of indecision. Nor have I forgotten the words to my local national anthem. Instead, those sets of letters are acronyms. Steven Mithen uses them to typify the foundations of our ability to communicate in our distant past. The letters stand for "Holistic, "multi-modal", "manipulative", and "musical". With the addition of "mimetic", he uses the collective phrase to explain why "music" in this broadly defined sense, preceded the development of language and grammar in our species. He also explains the "how" of this phenomenon, which is what gives this book its real value.

Mithen's previous works are a foundation for this one, although he openly admits that the phenomenon of music eluded him in them. He makes up for that oversight with a detailed examination of fossil and genetic information to support his thesis. As humans fluent in the use of speech, with its lexicons and syntax, we've become blinded to our true roots. We rush children through infancy, overlooking the process we use in communicating with those who lack words and their meanings. Mithen says this period is critical - both because its universality among cultures should tell us something about our past, and because a better understanding of the communication process can lead to smarter and healthier children. Who, among the mothers we know, fails to "sing" to their newborn?

In Mithen's view, that childhood communication method repeats what our African ancestors did with each other prior to the development of language. Words, in our time, are representative. They "mean" something - an object, an event, a lesson. In those early days, emotions, especially the basic ones of fear, flight, fight or feed, were the only significant topics. Music, he reminds us, is the language of emotion, whether it be lullabies to children or a Mozart aria. Newborns are particularly receptive to music or rhythmic sounds and gestures, especially when they're synchronised [hence "multi-modal"]. Newborns can't understand the words mothers use, but they comprehend the "message" [the "holistic" part].

The author explains how studies in brain activity associated with speech and music have given us great insight to the mind's processing of information. Where and when did these talents emerge? Mithen builds his thesis with careful detail, noting how our gaining a bipedal stature did more than distinguish us from the other apes. A range of body changes modified our method of movement, hand manipulation and breathing. It also impinged on our voices. The Early Humans, as Mithen broadly characterises the Homo genus, developed a range of sounds, with various pitches and volumes. The best way to use these new-found talents was in a musical manner and for a variety of circumstances.

Although nearly half the book must be consumed to reach the title's topic, the background is necessary for a full understanding. Homo neanderthalis, with its larger brain and stockier body than Homo sapiens, struggled for survival in Ice Age Europe. Even in the face of such stress, Neanderthal society remained doggedly static. The kinds of innovation speech might have spurred aren't found. Neanderthal excavation sites easily outnumber those of early Homo sapiens' digs in Africa, our original home. Yet in all those digs, nothing is found that would suggest the need for language. Jewellry only appears very late, probably introduced by Homo sapiens invading from Africa. And that invader brought a new talent in its armoury - language and symbolic representation. Which likely led, in Mithen's view, to our being the sole remaining Homo species.

Mithen isn't offering us wild speculation plucked from offhand supposition. Although he notes the interest in music as an evolutionary prompter is only beginning, his presentation rests on solid evidence. Support comes from Alison Wray - who suggested the term "holistic" and from Simon Kirby of Edinburgh University. Kirby applies computer modelling to show how recursive feedback reinforces word development in proto-languages. Indeed, it's noteworthy that Mithen's Notes section comprises a quarter of the book. There's one glaring error - genes aren't made of amino acids, they're comprised of codons. Editors and proofreaders are still catching up with the sciences, so we may forgive Mithen this small lapse. We'd better, since this ground-breaking book will lead to much discussion and likely no little acrimony in exchanges. That's good, because he has overturned a number of dogmas needing shedding. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

You can tell the ambitious scope of this book by its subtitle: "the origins of music, language, mind, and body." Wow! Is that all? Actually, the task the author sets out to do isn't as vast as one might at first suppose because they are seen as related in the way early hominids arose and then evolved further. Steven Mithen is less concerned with the origin of music than the way in which the homo sapiens mind differed from its ancestors and the then contemporary hominids.

But before I get to my attempt at summarizing what Mithen says about these matters, I want to address something else. The speculative stories that professional anthropologists and archaeologists tell have a very different meaning to them than they end up meaning for the general public and there is some small danger in that difference. Science professionals are all aware of the raw evidence and the context and conjecture surrounding each piece. There are always ambiguities and tentative "conclusions" arrived at by one authority or another and they often conflict. However, to make sense of a broad collection of data a story is created as a kind of summary of what is known at that time.

These stories are always fragile as art glass. But they can be a useful way of organizing what is known and if new evidence found fits within the model it is strengthened. However, it is known that any new evidence found might undo a part of the story or overthrow it altogether. The problem is that the general reader doesn't know the evidence and has no idea of its context. Such a reader is unlikely to read broadly enough to gain some sense of the strength of such a story and whether its speculation is more mainstream or something radical.

Whether the story is fairly constructed from the evidence, or is highly skewed in its presentation and is in fact untrustworthy cannot be known by the casual reader. Yet the story becomes the way the general reader is likely to discuss the topic, as if the story were fact. This can actually impede understanding rather than help because it freezes things in the reader's mind because work continues in the field and the story may be overthrown rather quickly. The author actually mentions this kind of effect when discussing the Divje Babe I "flute" which is more likely a bone bitten into by a bear than a flute. But in the popular imagination it remains a flute.

I am certainly not qualified to judge the evidence presented in this book nor any of the authors speculations or conclusions. What I can say is that the author tells his story well, is quite interesting, and does present the ambiguities of the evidence and various sides on many of the issues he discusses. I think such openness and fair-mindedness is a good sign even while one is advocating for a particular point of view.

Mithen's thrust in this book (if I understand it correctly) is that as early hominids developed into upright narrow-hipped creatures certain biological adaptations accompanied these developments that allowed homo ergaster and homo neanderthalensis and homo heidelbergensis and all the later hominids to make more flexible sounds than other related creatures. We can see the extension of those differences as we look at what the apes and monkeys do with "song" versus humans. (It is essential when reading this book when reading the words music and song to maintain the rudimentary nature of what he is describing versus the pieces by Bach, Brubeck, and Miles Davis that he refers to occasionally.) The author sees the sources of rhythm and music within the nature of our bodies and the way it moves and the sounds we are able to make because of our high larynx and flexible throat and mouth. I think this is exactly right.

But isn't this getting a bit ahead of the story? Surely language came before singing and dance? The author says no and his explanation is the main story of this book and is quite fascinating. There are two broad divisions about the rise of language. The first is the one most of us would have intuitively expected, that language started with one or two semi-grunted words and slowly evolved into Shakespeare. This is the compositional school. The other, that I had known nothing of until I read this book and am now quite persuaded by (see how being ignorant in the face of a great story teller can draw one in?) is known as the holistic development of speech.

In the holistic view, early hominids made certain calls that were not symbolic and contained whole meetings in the single utterance. One call might mean "give that to her" and another might mean "beware of the bear over there". But they were not words in our sense and could not be used to develop new phrases or sentences. They could not compose as we do. These calls rose out of the way early hominids, had to care for their young and can even be seen in remnant in our Infant Directed Speech and our penchant for phrases that we say without thinking or meaning, but preserve a function (such as "Howareyoudoing" "Iamfine"). He calls this early form of verbalization with the surprising acronym "Hmmmmm", which stands for Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and mimetic.

The Neanderthals referred to in the title lived tough lives. The author believes that all the evidence available about them shows they lived short (about 35 years) hard lives. He thinks they had a "domain intelligence". That is, their brains were capable of doing certain things like making fire or making and using tools, but did not have the interconnections and mental fluidity that developed in homo sapiens. They did not paint on walls, they did not make huts, and the author believes they could not speak in words. They used holistic song and dance to communicate, comfort their young, and develop interpersonal connectedness that strengthened their tribes.

Neanderthals were always on the precarious edge of survival and when homo sapiens showed up they disappeared. Mithen assures us that our ancestors didn't slaughter them to extinction, but offers no evidence for this. To me it sounds like a kind of political correctness borne of modern sensibilities against wanton killing. But I don't believe there is evidence one way or the other.

This book covers a great deal of ground that I can't even summarize here. It is worth reading for its valuable content and is also enjoyable if you like anthropology. As a musician, I did find his explanations of music a bit weak, but they made more sense as he developed his thesis. However, if you are looking for the explanation of how Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven came to be, you won't find it here. This is much more basic and about how the raw musical potential came to be.

I am reminded of the cartoon of a detailed equation on a blackboard that is labeled in various steps. Two scientists are standing in front of step two which says "and then a great miracle occurs" and one says to the other "I think you need to flesh out this step a bit more". It isn't that Mithen has left anything out for his story, but that for music to become something more than communal folk singing to the high art of Western Culture does require something more than the dismissal of such music as "elite" implying that it is somehow a prejudice not worthy of serious examination.

But that is beside the point. If you are interested in the development of early hominids, you will likely learn things from this book. If you want to learn about the holistic view of language development, this is a fine explanation. If you want to know more about how and when Neanderthals lived and how Homo Sapiens arose and filled the earth, this is a fine explanation. If you want to know about the differences in our musical potential versus other creatures in nature and what adaptations had to take place for that to happen, this is fascinating stuff.

So, recommended and enjoy!

Starts slow, but soon zooms along. Before you know it, you're in the midst of a fascinating story about monkey calls, baby babbling, opera and rock, and the weird, wired harmonies that cascade through the human nervous system when people engage in speech and song. Then, halfway through the book, using the information of the first half as a lens to bring the second half into focus, the author leads you on a trip from the darkest depths of hominid prehistory to the dawn of homo sapien culture, developing, as he goes, a theory about the origins of oral communication and music. The wonder of the book is not the theory, but the author's protean curiosity and delightful talent for explanation and synthesis. He weaves together strands of thought from all sorts of different disciplines to create an argument so lively and thought provoking that it doesn't matter if it's right. You come away full of ideas that seem to apply to almost everything you see. The book is a lovely, multi-layered intellectual tune, which makes you hummmm with thought as you turn each page.

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"The Neanderthals who inhabited Europe and south-west Asia had brains as large as those of modern humans but behaved in a quite different fashion, one that indicates the absence of language...So, what were the Neanderthals doing with such large brains?...Answer: the Neanderthals used their brains for a sophisticated communication system...[that I call] `Hmmmmm'...
'Hmmmmm'...proved remarkably successful: it allowed them to survive for a quarter of a million years through dramatic environmental change in ice-age Europe, and to attain an unprecedented level of cultural achievement. They were 'singing Neanderthals'--although their songs lacked any words."

The above quotation comes near the end of this fascinating book (and explains its title) by Dr. Steven Mithen, Professor of Early Prehistory (at the University of Reading, England), archeologist, and leading figure in the development of `cognitive archeology.'

What is the aim of this book? Mithen explains:

"We can only explain the human propensity to make and listen to music by recognizing that it has been encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species. How, when, and why are the mysteries that I intend to resolve [in this book]...This book sets out my own ideas about how music and language evolved, and evaluates the proposals of others by exposing them to the archaeological and fossil evidence...The result is a complete account of not only how music and language evolved but how they relate to the evolution of the human mind, body, and society."

As one who thoroughly enjoyed this book, I can validate what Mithen says above. He does examine a large array of data and proposals from many others and critically analyzes this information. Be aware that to understand the book's conclusions (one of which is quoted above), you have to carefully read and comprehend all the material presented beforehand. Mithen proved (at least to me) that he was well-adept at sorting through all the neurological, linguistical, psychological, biological, and archeological information (to name just some disciplines he delves into). (Don't worry! Mithen explains everything quite well so you're not expected to be an academic with a Ph.D.)

The book itself is divided into two parts. The first part (excluding chapter one which is an introduction) is concerned with what we understand about music and language today. Part two uses those features presented in part one to explain the evolutionary history of language and music.

To give the potential reader an idea of the breadth of this book, I will give the sub-title of each chapter:

Part I: The Present

(2) The similarities and differences between music and language
(3) The brain, aphasia (loss of using or understanding words), and musical savants
(4) Acquired and congenital amusia (inability to recognize or reproduce musical sounds)
(5) Music processing within the brain
(6) Brain maturation, language learning, and perfect pitch
(7) Music, emotion, medicine, and intelligence

Part II: The Past

(8) Communication by monkeys and apes
(9) The origin of `Hmmmm' (an acronym) communication
(10) The evolution of bipedalism and dance
(11) Communication about the natural world
(12) Is music a product of sexual selection?
(13) Human life history and emotional development
(14) The significance of cooperation and social bonding
(15) `Hmmmmm' communication by "Homo neanderthalensis" (Compare this acronym to that of (9) above)
(16) The origins of "Homo Sapiens" and the segmentation of `Hmmmmm'
(17) Modern human dispersal, communicating with the gods, and the remnants of 'Hmmmmm'

There are twenty figures peppered throughout this book. These are interesting and aid the discussion.

Finally, did I agree with everything I read in this book? Of course not. What Mithen is attempting to do is extremely difficult. There has to be some speculation and there is much of it in this book. However, it is reasoned speculation and I was impressed with how Mithen put everything together into a coherent whole.

In conclusion, this book attempts to explain the mystery of "the origins of music, language, mind and body." If you like mysteries like I do, then you should thoroughly enjoy this fascinating book!!

(first published 2005; 17 chapters; main narrative 280 pages; notes; bibliography; picture acknowledgements; index)

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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 admittedly speculative: he often argues from silence, for instance. But these speculations are informed extrapolations, and exploring them with his help is a highly stimulating, mind-expanding experience.

This book presents some interesting and refreshing speculations on how music and language evolved, emphasizing reasons for believing that music was at least as important as language during significant parts of human evolution. It stretches the limits of what we can figure out from the available evidence, so it's likely the some of it is wrong. But his hypotheses appear more likely to help us ask the right questions than to lead us astray.
Mithen's knowledge of archeology helps make his book different from most books about the human mind in that he emphasizes very different selective pressures at different stages in human evolution, corresponding to changes in conditions that our ancestors faced.
Here are some surprising and informative section titles that will tell you something about the flavor of the book: "The musical implications of bipedalism", and "The sexy hand-axe hypothesis".
I was intrigued by his description of how music helps a group cooperate by synchronizing their emotions. But he helps point out the limits of those benefits by noting that the chants at Nazi rallies that helped unite most of the German people.

The author has done a lot of research and talked with many experts. Unfortuntely, he builds on this with too many unwaranted assumptions and jumps to too many conclusions. Sometimes his information is obviously wrong. For instance, he says that pets, unlike infants, have no need for language so we don't hyperarticulate (draw out) our vowels when talking to pets as we do with infants. Nonsense. Listen to anyone training a dog and you'll hear, " Goo-o-o-od bo-o-o-y." Dogs have linquistic needs; they don't need to learn to talk, but we do want them to learn to listen.

He also proposes that when hominids became bipedal "they got rhythm," leading us to musical ability. Silly. Four-legged animals have a natural rhythm, too. Think of horses. They have a natural walking gait, a four-beat trot and a three-beat canter, and they settle into the rhythm that's easiest for them to maintain. Rhythm is inherent to movement, whether we were walking on fours or upright.

He makes obvious logic errors, too. He posits that because few Neandertal adults survived beyond 35, grandmothers would have been rare. Please. Mother at 13, grandmother at 26. It's fairly common that people who die young mature early, and he should know that.

He argues that Neandertals had no language because their culture would not have remained so stable. That ignores ideas such as this: a difficult life inhibits invention; when you are struggling to survive you have little time to invent, and you can't afford the mistakes which come from trying many new things. Also, witness the Japanese master/apprentice system that keeps craft work methods and styles similar for thousands of years -- in a culture with language.

All in all, it is annoying that he has collected so much information and then abused it. On top of which, the tone of his writing is arrogant and egotistical -- and that intrudes on the reading of the book and thinking about it. Too bad.

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 it).

In this book, Mithen culls together a trove of evidence relating to the possible origins of music in our species' evolutionary past. I think it needs to be granted from the outset that such a subject is not going to have the same kind of hard, precise evidence that something like skeletal evolution or the evolution of upright walking has in its favor. Given this, Mithen does a superb job of marshalling what evidence there is for music's origin and evolution, and makes you believe it possible, even as you remain critical of his hypotheses. You can see the weakness of some of the lines in his argument, but also the strength of others. Mithen seems humble enough before his subject, without getting wishy-washy in the face of the gray areas of uncertainty.

All together, a fascinating read; very informative--and courageous. This book will stand as a defense of music -- against its detractors (such as Steven Pinker) as a valuable part of our cultural human 'tool kit' until even more archaeological and paleoanthropological evidence becomes available.

Mithen's "The Prehistory of the Mind" was one of the most intellectually exciting books that I can remember reading. His thesis is that the sudden flowering of symbolic representation - like the beautiful cave art of Lascaux - only 40-50,000 years ago could only be explained by a radical change in the mind of homo sapiens. The apparent paradox he addresses, is why the undoubted technical abilities of early man and his ancestors - as evidenced in the abundant and often exquisitely fashioned stone and flint tools - had remained essentially at the same level for many hundreds of thousands of years. Throughout this time - including the period from about 190,000 to 50,000 yag during which anatomically modern humans existed - there is virtually no evidence of any use of these abilities to make anything that could be described as art or decoration. Mithen's solution to this paradox is that early homo sapiens had a "modular" mind - consisting of a "social" module, that allowed them to conduct their relationships with others, a "technical" module that helped them learn to manipulate materials and make tools, and a "natural history" module that understood the animals and plants in the world about them. What they lacked was an integration of these modules - "cognitive fluidity" - which would for example have allowed crossover between social and technical modules, and enabled man to use their technical abilities to fashion art or ornamentation which could be used to modulate or manipulate their relationships with others. It was the evolution of this integrative ability which caused the cultural/artistic florescence that we find so remarkeable.

Perhaps because I have followed and found very logical the arguments of the Evolutionary Psychologists, who see the mind as a collection of evolved adaptations to a series of specific fitness problems, I found Mithen's thesis very intuitive and appealing - even though it inevitably involves a great deal of speculation and extrapolation from evidence which can only be described as circumstantial (what the late S.J. Gould unkindly referred to as "Just So" stories).

Because of my enthusiasm for "Prehistory", I eagerly awaited subsequent books from Mithen. His second book "After the Ice - a Global Human History, 20,000-5,000 BC" was a huge disappointment; suffice it to say, that this was one of the few books I have started, and failed to read through to the end. The present book - although not in any way as groundbreaking or as stimulating as "Prehistory" - is a worthwhile read.

In fact it is a very "worthy" book; the central argument is that, as man's early ancestors evolved into fully bipedal hominids, they developed a means of communication, which was not language, which Mithen refers to as "Hmmmmm" - Holistic (consisting of whole sounds not parseable into words and syntax), Manipulative (designed to achieve ends, rather than describe), Multi-Modal (sound and body movement), Musical and Mimetic (using mimicry and immitation). The two two main supporting strands for this thesis involve, on the one hand consideration of the neurological and behavioral aspects of music and language, and on the other, hypotheses based on what is known about the lifestyles and selection pressures on early humans at different stages of evolution.


In the early chapters, Mithen's review of the similarities and differences between music and language, leads to the conclusion that they both evolved from some kind of primitive proto-language-music combination. He then reveals some fascinating aspects about what can only be described as the "competition" between linguistic and musical abilities for brain space. For example, that people with either congenital or acquired neural speech disorders often have enhanced musical abilities e.g perfect pitch - "musical savants". Or, that most infants possess perfect pitch (like many people suffering from autism). It appears that most babies are born with perfect pitch, which is gradually replaced by a bias toward relative pitch. Language acquisition involves the "unlearning" of perfect pitch (which is disadvantageous, because it prevents "generalization" - understanding that songs sung in different keys, or words spoken at different fundamental frequencies are the same.)

The second half of the book descibes what is known about the lifestyles of various early humans - homo ergaster, homo heidelbergiensis, and the neanderthals of the title - . Mithen's objective is to demonstrate that, at each of these stages, those individuals best able to communicate with their fellows, be trusted by them and gain their cooperation would have been the fittest (in darwinian terms). There would therefore have been a strong selective pressure for developing effective communication, and Mithen's argument is that this would have led to the progressive elaboration of communication into his "Hmmmm" - but not to language as we know it. Arguments involving many, many occurrences of words like "might have" and "we can imagine that" (which later morph into less speculative "did" and "were") are inevitable, given the paucity of hard evidence. They require the reader to very comprehensively "suspend disbelief" until the end, in order to see whether the whole edifice stands up or not.

Where Mithen is able to provide evidence or deductive argument from evidence, he does so. He also very conscientiously presents and evaluates evidence and counter-arguments that might contradict his thesis. Personally, I found the argument that, even the neanderthals - perhaps the closest and most recent relatives of modern humans - lacked language, quite convincing. However, Mithen's conclusion from this - that music played a major role in their lives (to the extent of having "performance spaces" in their caves) - left me unconvinced.

I have read several other books by Steven Mithen and have enjoyed them all. He presents his ideas in a readable and understandable way. He does much research and also does a lot of original thinking. I feel that some of the negative reviewers below are nit picking. The basic idea on which this book is based is stunningly simple and rings true. We are hard wired for music as well as language and both are communication tools.

Mithen maintains that music came first and formed the basis of Neanderthal "language". Much can be communicated with gesture, rhythm and vocalizations. Anyone who has tried to express their needs to someone who speaks another language knows that. It is only with the increase in the brainpower needed for abstraction does human language become possible. Thus, with the emergence of early modern humans, true language began to develop.

Vocabulary is based on a consensus on the meaning of arbitrary combinations of sounds. The relatively small community of early humans was perfect for the invention of the first proto-language, but the evolution of the brain's capacity for constructing language had to precede it.

Language sets up a feedback loop, encouraging abstract thought and shared problem solving. It is therefore not surprising that once it developed new techniques of tool making emerged, as did both Art and Religion.