This site is to explore the idea that music was central to the emergence of modern humans ~70,000 years ago.
Spiritual people rightly regard that humans have a faculty extra that animals don't have to any great extent. It is the combination of language, thought, perception, intuition, love, compassion, and empathy. Could this faculty have developed as a direct response to shared musical events, and conscious breeding by individuals into families that had musical abilities? Lets look at this:
1. Music is the most settling thing for impatient and bored babies.
2. Still today, the person who sings publicly is listened to no matter what the lyrics.
3. Singers attract more stardom than politicians, and attract more potential mates too.
4. Spiritual people invariably use music in their most sacred recitations, and whole societies and nations are in turn based on these spiritual traditions.
5. When someone gives a concert, the thing we can do to give them most honour is to clap. Honouring the sanctity of the voice, we use something other than the voice.
6. Tribes throughout the world, who have developed their societies without contacting other tribes on other continents, all use music and dance as the thing most binding them together: stories of the hunt, stories of mating, stories of mother earth's upheavals.
7. Geneticists have found that there was "positive selection" on the human voice, at some time during or since the emergence of modern humans. Another way of saying this, is that we chose partners with voices! ...or that those with voices had an advantage.
The idea that music is a key part of the origin of love, does not exclude the existence of love in animals. Gibbons for instance have well-developed singing and partying ability, and they too use singing to cement life long bonds. The faculty for speech, singing and music grew out of a pre-existing ability in all animals to perceive the presence of others, which in turn evolved out of a need to be able to guess whether a hunter or food or a potential mate was nearby, when smell, sight and hearing would not give enough clues. The mechanisms used to achieve these perceptions in animals are called mirror neurons, which are currently big news in the top science journals in the world. Music and speech have made tangible the preexisting faculty of communication, refined it and heightened it.
Rather than write a book about this, I'd like to put it out there on myspace to help us at a time when we are in dire need of something that can be seen as common to the various cultures of the earth. War is not the way of the future. While a defence capability is clearly neccessary, its opposite, offence, distracts us from accomplishing real prosperity. Some of these resources should be diverted to things that currently matter for survival. One reason for putting this site up is to bring attention to the search for a Global Warming Cure (banner below). Or is it vice versa? Which is raising attention for which? It's important both to live and to live well !!!
link to "Global Warming Cure"
[Thanks to Pablo Picasso for the icon La Joie de Vivre, used to represent this page]
very warmest regards, - from Bob
Four Year Old Drummer!
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