“It Don’t Mean a Thing if It Ain’t Got that Swing”– an Alternative Concept for Understanding the Evolution of Dance and Music in Human Beings

Abstract

The functions of dance and music in human evolution are a mystery. Current research on the evolution of music has mainly focused on its melodic attribute which would have evolved alongside (proto-)language. Instead, we propose an alternative conceptual framework which focuses on the co-evolution of rhythm and dance (R&D) as intertwined aspects of a multimodal phenomenon characterized by the unity of action and perception. Reviewing the current literature from this viewpoint we propose the hypothesis that R&D have co-evolved long before other musical attributes and (proto-)language. Our view is supported by increasing experimental evidence particularly in infants and children: beat is perceived and anticipated already by newborns and rhythm perception depends on body movement. Infants and toddlers spontaneously move to a rhythm irrespective of their cultural background. The impulse to dance may have been prepared by the susceptibility of infants to be soothed by rocking. Conceivable evolutionary functions of R&D include sexual attraction and transmission of mating signals. Social functions include bonding, synchronization of many individuals, appeasement of hostile individuals, and pre- and extra-verbal communication enabling embodied individual and collective memorizing. In many cultures R&D are used for entering trance, a base for shamanism and early religions. Individual benefits of R&D include improvement of body coordination, as well as painkilling, anti-depressive, and anti-boredom effects. Rhythm most likely paved the way for human speech as supported by studies confirming the overlaps between cognitive and neural resources recruited for language and rhythm. In addition, dance encompasses visual and gestural communication. In future studies attention should be paid to which attribute of music is focused on and that the close mutual relation between R&D is taken into account. The possible evolutionary functions of dance deserve more attention.

The Paradox of Isochrony in the Evolution of Human Rhythm

“…A third common human activity where isochrony is hypothesized to play a role is dance ( Fitch, 2016 ; Laland et al, 2016 ; Richter and Ostovar, 2016 ; Su, 2016a , b ). Similarly to music, a series of isochronous events, such as a drum line, may provide anchor points in time used to structure dance movements ( Fitch, 2016 ; Laland et al, 2016 ).…”

Shakespeare in Love: A Fictional Transliteration of the Grammar of Heterosexual Mating

“…What seems once again a mere hedonic expedient to elicit a momentary peak of romantic excitement in the audience becomes, from a deeper eudemonic perspective, the key narrative juncture that allows the woman to carry out in turn her Compatibility Test-and which, in the cultural contexts where forms of social segregation between sexes prevail, often corresponds, as it happens in our example as well-to a dance scene. Dance can in fact be considered as a true socialized form of reciprocal exploration of the potential partners' bodily characteristics (Fink, Weege, Neave, Pham, & Shackelford, 2015), and not incidentally it presents a strong cultural universality, and fits within a fundamental trajectory of psycho-physiological development of human beings (Richter & Ostovar, 2016). Such exploration takes, for the above discussed reasons, an especially crucial role for women (Weege, Lange, & Fink, 2012), who in many societies experiment strong restrictions to the possibility of physical contact with men out of wedlock, and who would otherwise have little or no chance to probe male physical and genetic endowments without incurring in possibly serious forms of social sanction.…”

Not all about sex: neural and biobehavioral functions of human dance

“…We can only speculate about how and why dance evolved and remained an important part of the human behavioral repertoire . At first glance this seems counterintuitive, especially considering that dance is such an energetically costly activity with no apparent functional use.…”

“…We can only speculate about how and why dance evolved and remained an important part of the human behavioral repertoire. 49 At first glance this seems counterintuitive, especially considering that dance is such an energetically costly activity with no apparent functional use. Several disciplines provide indirect evidence for this counterintuitive fact, including (1) archaeology (review of evidence of prehistoric cave art of dance representations to explore how long dance has been part of human life; (2) comparative psychology (review of evidence of dance-related (motor entrainment) behaviors in other animal species, close to or far from the human lineage); (3) developmental psychology (review of evidence for emergence of dance-like behaviors during ontogeny), and (4) cross-cultural psychology (analysis of universal features of dance styles in independent contemporary human cultures).…”