A million years of music : the emergence of human modernity / Gary Tomlinson.
| Author/creator | Tomlinson, Gary |
| Format | Book |
| Edition | First edition. |
| Publication | New York : Zone Books, 2015. |
| Distribution | Cambridge, Massachusetts ; London, England : Distributed by the MIT Press |
| Copyright Date | ©2015 |
| Description | 362 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm |
| Subjects |
| Contents | Preface: concepts, models, machines -- Some first principles. Listening back ; Incrementalism ; Perils of adaptationism ; Coevolution, sociality, and culture ; The biocultural coevolution of hominins ; Looking forward -- 1,000,000 years ago: Acheulean performances. Marteau sans maître ; Acheulean industries ; Embodied symmetries ; The Chaîne Opératoire and taskscape ; Mimetic traditions ; Entrainment ; The Acheulean increment ; Poiesis -- 500,000 years ago: lower Paleolithic voices. The vocalized taskscape ; Copresence ; Mindreading and shared attention ; Protolanguage ; Protodiscourse and gesture-calls ; Myths about musical protolanguage ; Prosody and melodic contour ; The negotiated voicescape ; Excursus: social intelligence, baboon minds, and connectionist cognition -- 250,000 years ago: Neanderthal digitalization. Protodiscourse as protomusical structure ; Middle Paleolithic heuristics ; Neandertal lithics ; Further protomusical structure ; Discrete Neandertals -- 100,000 years ago: symbolic et non. An archaeological conundrum ; Regressive symbolism ; Peirce, deacon, and emergent symbolism ; Symbolocentrism and the indexical challenge ; System without symbol: a phylogeny of discrete pitch ; Glimpses of modernity -- 100,000-20,000 years ago, I: Homo sapiens and the falling out of modern culture. The fine grain ; Migrations and climates ; Population and innovation ; Repeating epicycles: engravings and beads out of Africa ; Trackless paths -- 100,000-20,000 years ago, II: musicking. How the hunters returned ; Differences over Aurignacian difference ; What Aurignacian musical pipes tell us ; Musicking ; Musicking on the transcendental taskscape -- Afterward -- Evolution, emergence, and history: a final note. |
| Abstract | 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. In this path-breaking book, the author draws from these areas to construct a new narrative for the emergence of human music. Starting at a period of human prehistory long before Homo sapiens or music existed, the author 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. But the book is not about music alone. The author builds a model of human evolution that revises our understanding of the interaction of biology and culture across evolutionary time-scales, challenging and enriching current models of our deep history. As he tells his story, he draws in other emerging human traits: language, symbolism, a metaphysical imagination and the ritual it gives rise to, complex social structure, and the use of advanced technologies. His model of evolution allows him to account for much of what makes us a unique species in the world today and provides a new way of understanding the appearance of humanity in its modern form. |
| Local note | Little--305140058671 |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| LCCN | 2014024072 |
| ISBN | 9781935408659 |
| ISBN | 1935408658 hardcover |