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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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Music as a coevolved system for social bonding
Savage, P. E., Loui, P., Tarr, B., Schachner, A., Glowacki, L., Mithen, S., & Fitch, W. T. (2020) · Behavioral and Brain Sciences · doi:10.1017/s0140525x20000333 · Cited by 662
The ice-breaker effect: Singing mediates fast social bonding
Pearce, E., Launay, J., & Dunbar, R. I. M. (2015) · Royal Society Open Science · doi:10.1098/rsos.150221 · Cited by 507
Without it no music: cognition, biology and evolution of musicality
Honing, H., ten Cate, C., Peretz, I., & Trehub, S. E. (2015) · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rstb.2014.0088 · Cited by 342
The evolutionary biology of musical rhythm: was Darwin wrong?
Patel, A. D. (2014) · PLoS Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001821 · Cited by 145
Four principles of bio-musicology
Fitch, W. T. (2015) · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rstb.2014.0091 · Cited by 164
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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