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Is it known when humans or our ancestors first started to sing?
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Joshua Bamford
Jyv盲skyl盲, Finland
Identifying the exact moment when humans began to sing is a difficult task. Unfortunately, songs don鈥檛 fossilise or leave many artefacts, at least until the invention of written musical notation and audio recordings. The best we can do is give an estimated range in which singing first emerged. Similarly, it is difficult to know exactly why our ancestors started to sing, but there are some good theories.
The earliest evidence of crafted instruments are bone flutes from around 40,000 years ago, and paintings found in the same caves as those first bone flutes depict human figures that appear to be dancing. However, humans were probably singing and dancing long before they were crafting instruments or depicting dance rituals on cave walls.
Studies of chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, show that they don鈥檛 have the vocal control required to sing. This means that our singing abilities probably developed after early hominins diverged from our last common ancestor with chimpanzees, around 5 million to 7 million years ago. Fossil remains of heads and jaws suggest that some hominins may have had the required anatomy to control their voice up to 1 million years ago, so it is possible that they could sing, although we don鈥檛 know if they actually did. So our best guess is that singing, in our evolutionary lineage, first emerged sometime in the past 1 million years but before 40,000 years ago. Singing is now found in all contemporary human cultures, albeit with great variation in the nature of the music being performed.
Our singing abilities probably developed after early hominins diverged from our last common ancestor with chimpanzees
Why did we start singing? Speculation goes right back to when Charles Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution through sexual selection and suggested that singing might be a sexually selected trait in humans, as well as birds. A later theory, developed by Robin Dunbar (who came up with Dunbar鈥檚 number 鈥� the notion that most people have around 150 relationships), suggests that singing and dancing allow humans to bond efficiently with many people at once, which helped human group sizes to get so much larger than the group sizes of other primates.
Others have suggested that singing is most important for parent-infant bonding and see the origins of song in infant-directed speech. Also known as 鈥減arentese鈥�, infant-directed speech emphasises the musical aspects of spoken language, with heightened pitch and rhythm. Whether to refer to this as 鈥渟inging鈥� is a matter of debate.
Unfortunately, we can鈥檛 (yet) observe all of human evolutionary history in the lab, so we will never know exactly what the reason was. It does seem plausible that both singing and speaking evolved from a common proto-musical language, somewhat like parentese, which may have initially been used to communicate with infants but later developed into a means of bonding with other adults, both in groups and with romantic partners.
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