A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity
by Gary Tomlinson

Reviewed by Matthew Franke

Although people make or listen to music on a regular basis, its origins are lost in the deep eons of pre-history. The most obvious connection, of course, is to animal noises such as birdsong. And yet music and birdsong are not, in fact, neatly analogous. As far as scientists can determine, most birdsong, unlike music, is not abstract but instead has specific real-world functions: birds use their songs to communicate basic messages, such as warning cries and mating calls. In this sense, at least, birdsong is more directly analogous to human speech, though lacking in the vocabulary and grammar of speech. While human music can be used for specific purposes (dancing, funerals, movie soundtracks, etc.), it rarely communicates little specific content that can be translated into words, does not seem to serve a biologically or psychologically necessary function, and so seems to exists without an analogous purpose to be found in the non-human biological world. Music is elusive, both as a concept and as a behavior.

Explanations into people’s ability to make music have generally followed two basic lines: as a survival of an otherwise forgotten behavior, and as a modern adaptation that puts old parts of the brain to new use. Both theoretical lines tend to work backwards from each author’s concept of music as a sonic and social phenomenon. In other words, they take as their starting fact music in its modern form, and then work backward to locate ancestral constituent parts. The Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, thought music was proto-linguistic, providing the elements from which the complex structures of spoken language emerged. More recent scholarship has tended to follow the latter line, explaining the appearance of music as an adaptation of other behaviors. Charles Darwin, for example, thought music was a derivation of ancient courtship rituals, drawing parallels between the vocalizations of apes and modern human music-making. Others have suggested that music began as a group phenomenon that originally served to maintain social structures, or that it is a development of baby-talk (what academics and medical professionals call “infant-directed speech”). In his popular book How the Mind Works (1997), psychologist Steven Pinker describes music as “auditory cheesecake” that could disappear without altering human behavior in any significant way.

In A Million Years of Music, Gary Tomlinson, professor of music at Yale University, has put forward a new hypothesis to answer this age-old question. Departing from prior strands of thought on the subject, Tomlinson insists that music is not a secondary form of communication, neither the remnant of a protolanguage nor the adaptation of now-forgotten social activities. For Tomlinson, music is instead an emergent phenomenon that puts cognitive processing abilities developed in other contexts to a new purpose. Music essentially provides a record of the complex interactions between culture and evolution that made modern humans who we are.

At the surface level, Tomlinson’s argument thus resembles prior arguments about music’s development from earlier non-musical behaviors. The key difference, however, is that Tomlinson does not link musical activity as a whole to the survival of a single earlier behavior, such as courtship. Instead, he dismisses unitary-origin theories on the grounds that music—humanity’s most complex system for sorting non-referential information—requires such diverse and complex cognitive abilities that it is unlikely to have a single point of origin.

Drawing on the writings of Christopher Small and others, he focuses on music as a participatory activity, rather than as an object that is consumed or as a tool for social organization. Therefore, he sees musicking—the ability to make and experience music—as an essential part of the human experience today. Music, like speech, “did not develop” but “fell out…from patterns of sociality and communication neither musical nor linguistic.” The development of musicking, in his view, complements the emergence of conscious thought; music uses essential skills that helped make people human. The story of musicking, for Tomlinson, is the story of the origins of human modernity itself.

Tomlinson refuses to pinpoint the exact origins of music. Instead, Tomlinson’s central, original insight is that music in the modern sense is deeply rooted in our evolutionary prehistory, with many of the traits that are essential elements of music-making originating in other contexts. He is at pains to emphasize that his book does not describe the origins of music but only the first periods from which evidence survives of the mental behaviors that enabled music's existence. The emergence of ideas and behaviors, rather than their origin, is a central concept for Tomlinson. Consider, for example, his analysis of Acheulean stone hammers, which he uses as evidence of the development of human rhythmic ability. Tomlinson argues that these hammers, some over a million years old but made in similar patterns for thousands of years, constitute the first surviving evidence that people were able to follow a set of steps to achieve a desired result. They are, in effect, evidence of human culture before the development of language: a culture that must have communicated through gesture and physical imitation, and the hammers suggest that the Acheuleans must been able to predict and participate in linked series of gestures – a prerequisite for the origin of rhythm – not simply isolated individual movements.

Tomlinson's argument throughout A Million Years of Music combines the study of evolution with that of culture to create a biocultural theory of music’s origins. Tomlinson is inspired by the work of anthropologist Terrence Deacon, who has examined the relationship between culture and biology through his work on the decoupling of behavior from biological necessity. Domesticated finches, for example, exhibit greater song variety than wild finches, which Deacon argues derives from the fact that song is no longer necessary for mating rituals. Expanding from this essential insight, Tomlinson argues that culture and biology exist in a feedback loop, in which cultural developments affect biological developments, and vice versa. Humans interact with their environment, and simultaneously share, shape, and are shaped, by it. Culture thus provides a way for adaptations to survive before biological changes can occur and a way for biologically necessary behaviors to survive after their ostensible use is no longer needed.

Despite its title, A Million Years of Music cannot—and does not—literally explore one million years of music; the real subject of the book is the development of the mental capacities that eventually allowed humans to make music, or at least to leave evidence of musicking. Since these developments took about a million years, and musicking in the modern sense only appears in the seventh of the book’s eighth chapters (the last 100,000 years), the bulk of the book is devoted to describing archeological and anthropological evidence that Tomlinson argues trace the development of various abilities that more recently coalesced into modern musicking. This is, in fact, less a history of music than a pre-history of music, one that examines the archaeological record for evidence for the ancestral ingredients of modern musical behavior. Consequently, readers seeking a survey of all that is known about the surviving musical artifacts of prehistoric humans should best look elsewhere: only two ancient musical instruments are discussed in the book (although these are depicted in a handsome pair of high-resolution, full-color plates).

A Million Years of Music, as a work that synthesizes research from a number of fields without oversimplifying any of it, is a necessarily complex text. Tomlinson surveys relevant work from archeology, paleoanthropology, evolutionary studies, and music cognition. Because Tomlinson is best known as a music historian, it’s tempting to describe this book as “interdisciplinary” and be done with it. But that overused term does not do justice to the enthusiasm that Tomlinson shows for disciplines outside his native musicology. Nor does it provide any sense of the minuscule role that music actually plays in the book (he rarely invokes musicological perspectives: the first explicit instance is on p. 90). In this sense, Tomlinson’s project seems to owe more to evolutionary studies and paleoanthropology to than to musicology as practiced in the United States today. At the same time, the book is essentially musicological in its broader aims: it does investigate the history of music and culture, though via methods almost wholly derived from other disciplines. This is interdisciplinarity at the deepest level, not merely a surface-level engagement with passing trends in other fields.

Tomlinson is scrupulous in his analysis, refusing to propose or accept simplistic answers to the weighty questions he poses. Most chapters summarize important theories or debates from relevant fields, often in exhaustive detail, before clarifying the relevance of these issues to the emergence of music in hominin culture. Attentive to the risks posed by any account of origins that reads history backwards from the present – that fabricates, in other words, a “history” in which the origin of modern musicking seems to follow inevitably – Tomlinson constructs his history “from the bottom up,” trying to conceptualize the emergence of music as an accidental result of an accidental alignment of historical forces. What prior traits aligned to enable early humans to learn how to make tools without language? How did early humans develop the abstract thinking skills necessary to make flutes with fixed pitches?

Because the stakes are so high, A Million Years of Music does not make for light reading. Throughout the volume, the arguments are dense, heavily-footnoted, and at times weighed down by the professional jargon of multiple academic fields: it’s likely to be difficult reading for both academics and lay readers. The rare occasions when Tomlinson lapses into a journalistic tone—such as a hypothetical account of homo sapiens exploring northern Europe—throw the turgid prose in the rest of the book into sharp relief.

And yet, A Million Years of Music is a crucial work which provides a fresh perspective on an old problem. It is, in many ways, the ultimate rebuttal of Steven Pinker’s glib dismissal of music as a disposable pleasure stimulus (Tomlinson is understandably acerbic when discussing Pinker). Written with passion and great erudition, it demonstrates music's role as an essential part of human identity, rivaling speech. Readers interested in the origins of music, the role of culture in prehistoric societies, and evolutionary theory should be able to appreciate the complexity of Tomlinson’s interdisciplinary approach. Admirers of this book and enthusiasts of the history of music and ideas can celebrate the fact that Tomlinson is working on a sequel, Culture and the Course of Human Evolution. Until that volume’s publication, this book stands alone as a rare musicological examination of music’s origins. For that reason alone, it is worth slow and careful scrutiny.