Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had similar auditory and speech capacities

Conde-Valverde, Mercedes; Martı́nez, Ignacio; Quam, Rolf; Rosa, Manuel Megías; Velez, Alex D; Lorenzo, Carlos; Jarabo, Pilar; Castro, José Marı́a Bermúdez de; Carbonell, Eudald; Arsuaga, Juan Luís

doi:10.1038/s41559-021-01391-6

Cited by 40 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…41 This task requires a lower position of the larynx in the vocal tract, which must have emerged to support singing-like vocalizations as they obtained greater importance in social life [451]. Yet another confident proto-musical proxy is the anatomy of the inner ear and the audiometry of hominis species -the current research points to Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthalis as sharers of basically the same hearing functionality as those found in modern humans [452][453][454][455]. Having the capacities to sing and coordinate the vocal apparatus with the heard sounds, early Homo might have accidentally discovered the effect of singing out, liked its sound, and used it repeatedly to experience pleasure -which would acoustically distinguish the protomusical application from proto-verbal.…”

Section: Stage 1: Proto-musicmentioning

confidence: 82%

The evolution of human music in light of increased prosocial behavior: a new model

Nikolsky¹,

Benítez‐Burraco²

2022

Preprint

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Together with language, music is perhaps our most distinctive behavioral trait. Following the lead of paleolinguistic research, different hypotheses have been proposed to explain why only humans perform music and how this ability might have evolved in the species. In this paper, we advance a new model of music evolution that builds on the theory of self-domestication, according to which the human phenotype is, at least in part, the outcome of a process similar to mammal domestication, triggered by a progressive reduction in reactive aggression levels in response to environmental changes. In the paper, we specifically argue that changes in aggression management through the course of human cultural evolution can account for the behaviors conducive to the emergence and evolution of music. We hypothesize 4 stages in the evolutionary development of music under the influence of environmental changes and evolution of social organization: starting from musilanguage, proto-music gave rise to personal and private forms of timbre-oriented music, then to small-group ensembles of pitch-oriented music, at first of indefinite and then definite pitch, and finally to collective (tonal) music. These stages parallel what has been hypothesized for languages and encompass the diversity of music types and genres described worldwide. Overall, music complexity emerges in a gradual fashion under the effects of enhanced abilities for cultural niche construction, resulting from the stable trend of reduction in reactive aggression towards the end of the Pleistocene, leading to the rise of hospitality codes, and succeeded by increase in proactive aggression from the beginning of the Holocene onward. This paper addresses numerous controversies in the literature on the evolution of music by providing a clear structural definition of music, identifying its structural features that distinguish it from oral language, and summarizing the typology of operational functions of music and formats of its transmission. The proposed framework of structural approach to music arms a researcher with means to identify and comparatively analyze different schemes of tonal organization of music, placing them in the context of human social and cultural evolution. Especially valuable contribution to the understanding of transition from animal communication to human music and language is the theory of so-called “personal song”, described and analyzed here from ethological, social, cultural, cognitive, and musicological perspectives. The emergence of personal song and its development into a social institution are interlinked with the evolution of kinship and placed into the timeline of cultural evolution, based on totality of ethnographic, archaeological, anthropological, genetic, and paleoclimatic data.

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Section: Stage 1: Proto-musicmentioning

confidence: 82%

The evolution of human music in light of increased prosocial behavior: a new model

Nikolsky¹,

Benítez‐Burraco²

2022

Preprint

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“…More robust evidence, on decorative bones, feathers, or constructions (Jaubert et al, 2016;Majkić et al, 2017;Finlayson, 2019), enables attributing complex social and cultural life to our sister lineages. Evidence in support of this attribution includes anatomical findings about the anatomy and physiology of the vocal tract, and about breathing control and acoustic sensitivity (Conde-Valverde et al, 2021), which indicates how close Neanderthal cochlear volume and audition (Beals et al, 2016;Stoessel et al, 2016) were to modern humans. Together, this mounting evidence demonstrates that symbolic behavior and speech also existed beyond our lineage.…”

Section: Vocal Language Not Solely a Human Privilegementioning

confidence: 95%

Language, Childhood, and Fire: How We Learned to Love Sharing Stories

Lauer

2022

Front. Psychol.

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Stories do not fossilize. Thus, exploring tales shared during prehistory, the longest part of human history inevitably becomes speculative. Nevertheless, various attempts have been made to find a more scientifically valid way into our deep human past of storytelling. Following the social brain hypothesis, we suggest including into the theory of human storytelling more fine-grained and evidence-based findings (from archaeology, the cognitive sciences, and evolutionary psychology) about the manifold exaptation and adaptation, genetic changes, and phenotypic plasticity in the deep human past, which all shaped the emergence of storytelling in hominins. We identify three preconditions for humans sharing stories: first, the long evolution of language in the different taxa as one of the preconditions of ostensive signaling; second, the pivotal role of childhood in the evolution of collaborative intentionality; and third, the role of fireside chats in the rise of elaborative (i.e., narrative) sharing of stories. We propose that humans, albeit perhaps no other hominins learned to understand others through sharing stories, not only as intentional agents, but also as mental ones.

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“…We cannot comment here on the relation between these structures which are not entirely preserved in the two fossils, this subject will certainly merit a specific study in the future. However, besides the numerous differences in dimensions and shape of all the internal features of the temporal bone, H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens are said to have similar auditory capacities according to the analysis of estimated sound power transmission inside the outer and middle ear and the resulting bandwidth (Conde-Valverde et al, 2021). This result has been interpreted in terms of potentially similar speech capacities.…”

Section: Internal Temporal Bone Morphologymentioning

confidence: 99%