A Million Years of Music

Download or read book A Million Years of Music written by Gary Tomlinson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-02-27 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the origin of music? In the last few decades this centuries-old puzzle has been reinvigorated by new archaeological evidence and developments in the fields of cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. Starting at a period of human prehistory long before Homo sapiens or music existed, Tomlinson describes the incremental attainments that, by changing the communication and society of prehuman species, laid the foundation for musical behaviors in more recent times. He traces in Neandertals and early sapiens the accumulation and development of these capacities, and he details their coalescence into modern musical behavior across the last hundred millennia