A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity

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, renowned musicologist Gary Tomlinson 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, Tomlinson describes the incremental attainments that, by
changing the communication and society of prehumen 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 A Million Years of Music is
not about music alone. Tomlinson 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. Tomlinson's 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.