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The Origin of Music – Dating Back to Neanderthals and Homosapiens

The father of evolutionary biology and naturalist Charles Darwin was per the first man to describe and explain why and how human beings became musical. One of the book of Charles Darwin on evolutionary theory published in the year 1871 and titled as “the descent of man and selection in relation to sex” which says that it was analogous to bird song which helped in attracting mates by the male birds and to warn off he rivals. However, in the contemporary numerous research and studies, the idea seems to be irrelevant because singing had been never exclusively a male pastime, but females sang too. When you ask to musicians, music recording studios as well as people who love music and have some knowledge and experience of music, about the relation between male/female and music, many, especially music professionals like Songmill Studios say that both male and female have equal abilities and potentialities of performing music as well as loving music.

As per archaeological excavations, the earliest axes and spears date back to 1.7 million years and 500,000 years respectively whereas the earliest the musical instrument date back to 40000 years. It is further interesting to explore that while musical instrument is a comparatively recent innovation, music is much more older than the musical instrument. Even some of the researches claim that the early humans communicated through different mediums much before language was invented and this is further linked to the emergence of monogamy. The communications before the existence of language also helped the early and pre-human societies for social glue.

The origin of music authentically datesback to 40000 years back in Europe when there were Neanderthals living in the territory. The Neanderthals probably inherited the art of music from the human species who existed a million years before. But the emergence of Homo sapiens who were clever than the Neanderthals, and were armed with superior weapons than the Neanderthals, wiped out and outnumbered the Neanderthals within a short span of around 5000 years. Soon after that, the Neanderthals vanished entirely. However, the fascinated Homo sapiens picked up the music from the Neanderthals and made the musical instruments out of bones and ivory.

There are possibilities that the Neanderthals were not as brutal and barbarous as the popular imagination says, rather some of the modern and latest researches claim that some of the cognitive capacities were equal to the modern humans. Therefore, it may not be wrong to conceive that the Neanderthals were capable of making musical instrumentsas far as the bone flute of 40000 years back is the evidence of the existence of music among Neanderthals.