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The Prehistory of Music: Human Evolution, Archaeology, and the Origins of Musicality
Abstract
Abstract Music is possessed by all human cultures, and archaeological evidence for musical activities pre-dates even the earliest-known cave art. Music has been the subject of keen investigation across a great diversity of fields, from neuroscience and psychology to ethnography, archaeology, and its own dedicated field, musicology. Despite the great contributions that these studies have made towards understanding musical behaviours, much remains mysterious about this ubiquitous human phenomenon — not least, its origins. This book brings together evidence from these fields, and more, in investigating the evolutionary origins of our musical abilities, the nature of music, and the earliest archaeological evidence for musical activities amongst our ancestors. It seeks to understand the true relationship between our unique musical capabilities and the development of the remarkable social, emotional, and communicative abilities of our species.
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“Singing is found in all human societies and can be performed to some extent by the vast majority of humans: singing is a universal human behavioural capacity, and this implies that it could have arisen as an evolutionary adaptation [21,22].”
From The ice-breaker effect: Singing mediates fast social bonding (2015) · cites this paper as [22]
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Metadata
- Authors
- Morley, I.
- Corresponding author
- Morley, Iain
- Venue
- Oxford University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press
- Published
- 2013-10-24
- OpenAlex
- W4244911669
- Cited by
- 179
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 34 · 2024: 35 · 2023: 11 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 12 · 2020: 13 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 24 · 2017: 9 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 12 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 2.16
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Oxford University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neuroscience and Music Perception
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Music › Musicology and Musical Analysis
- Keywords
- origins of music, prehistoric music, cave art, music and communication, music and emotion, human evolution
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