Introduction

An Overwhelming Question

A single question, broken down into three fundamental parts, asked by the great French painter Paul Gauguin in an obscure corner of his final masterpiece: “D'où venons-nous? / Qui sommes-nous? / Où allons-nous?” “Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?”

We all ask ourselves more or less the same question, don't we? But isn't it one of those metaphysical questions that can't ever really be answered? As I see it, Gauguin’s words should not be interpreted in the context of Western metaphysics, but as a reflection of the much more down to earth mode of thought we find, time and again, in the words of indigenous people.

A religious Westerner might respond that we come from God; a scientific Westerner might be more matter of fact: we come from our mother's womb; but for most indigenous people, there is one response: we come from the ancestors. As for “who are we”? What the ancestors want us to be. “Where are we going?” Back to join the ancestors. What suggests to me that this was Gauguin's intention is the mysterious bird we see on the lower left, next to the old woman contemplating her death. In Tahitian mythology, large white birds were seen as messengers of Ta'aroa, the most powerful of the ancestral gods (http://www.tahitiguide.com/@en-us/584/articlepopup.asp).

So. Our question should not be understood as the usual Western, “metaphysical” question to which we have for so long become accustomed, but the more down to earth historical question of interest to all humans: who were our ancestors, what were they like, what part of their legacy has survived, and what lessons can we derive therefrom? My claim is that such questions are now, for the first time, actually open to serious study, thanks largely to evidence from the two fields that will be highlighted throughout this volume: music and genetics.

A Baseline

The basic argument can be summarized as follows:

1. the Pygmies and Bushmen of Africa, now recognized by population geneticists as carriers of the most ancient lineages in the world, share a remarkable musical language, despite many thousands of miles of separation in completely different regions of Africa, with totally different environments -- strongly suggesting that this musical practice is a survival from the time the geneticists tell us the two populations most likely  diverged, tens of thousands of years ago.

2. thus, astonishing as it might sound, by listening to a recording of traditional Pygmy or Bushmen music, we are, in a sense, entering a kind of time warp, hearing the sort of sounds our African ancestors may well have been making anywhere from 70,000 to over 100,000 years ago.

3. and if their shared musical traditions, like their genetic “clades,”  have a common root, deeply buried in the heart of the Paleolithic era, then it's possible to infer that other traditions shared by both groups might also be survivals of cultural practices inherited from the same ancestral population.

The logic outlined above enables us to go beyond the realms of music and genetics to postulate a hypothetical baseline representing the culture of this ancestral population, from which, in theory at least, all subsequent cultures are derived. On this basis, drawing upon a wide array of evidence, the book takes the reader on a journey through some of the deepest recesses of human history, suggesting solutions to mysteries that, until recently, were thought to be completely beyond the reach of systematic investigation.

An Outline of History

Chapter One relates the stories behind the discovery of key bodies of evidence from each of the two realms on which the book draws most heavily: 1. the shared musical language of the African Pygmies and Bushmen, whose music and culture will be significant points of reference throughout; 2. the revolutionary new research of the population geneticists, for whom both groups uniquely represent the deepest branches of the human family tree.

Chapter Two deals with a key question of population genetics: what can it mean to say that the Pygmies and Bushmen are somehow special because they stem from a ‘common root,’ if that same root is the one we all sprang from? In response, I consider some of the most recent and convincing genetic evidence. Most of the statistics are expressed via “phylogenetic trees,” or, in less technical terms, family trees, which distill the genetic findings in diagrams that are relatively easy to grasp. In each case we see three specific populations, Western Pygmies, Eastern Pygmies and Bushmen occupying the deepest branches, implying that all three populations diverged from our “Most Recent Common Ancestor” well into the Paleolithic era.

Chapter Three takes us from the realm of music and genetics to that of culture generally. If indeed we are transported tens of thousands of years into the past by the distinctive sound of Pygmy and Bushmen music, we can take its hand, so to speak, to be led inexorably from the aesthetic to the social, from musical style to cultural style, from the distinctive organization of sound to the equally distinctive social structure appropriate to the production of that sound. The intimate connection between Pygmy/Bushmen musical style and the values that form the core culture of all three populations (Western Pygmies, Eastern Pygmies and Bushmen) is revealed through the eyes of anthropologists and ethnomusicologists who have studied such groups extensively.

If such correspondences are indeed meaningful, and the ancestral group represented in the phylogenetic trees displayed in Chapter Two did indeed vocalize in Pygmy/Bushmen style (P/B), then this very distinctive mode of musical behavior would have reflected the ancestral social structure in precisely the same manner as it reflects the social structure of contemporary Pygmies and Bushmen. And if this is in fact the case, we cannot ignore the possibility that other traditions also held in common by representatives of all three populations (Eastern Pygmies, Western Pygmies and Bushmen) could also be grounded in the culture of the group ancestral to all.

Taking the evidence and arguments presented in the previous chapters to their logical conclusion, Chapter Four proposes a methodology of “triangulation,” operating as follows:  “Any distinctive value system, belief system, artifact or attribute not likely to be the result of outside influence, found among at least three different groups representing each of the three populations with the deepest genetic clades, i.e., Eastern Pygmies, Western Pygmies and Bushmen (EP, WP, Bu), may be regarded as a potential survival from an older tradition traceable to the historical ‘moment’ of earliest divergence.”   

On the basis of such commonalities a “Hypothetical Baseline Culture” (HBC) is postulated, representing the subsistence strategies, dwellings, bodily ornamentation, language, music, rituals, kinship system, behavior and core values of the common ancestral group. While these are certainly not the only traditions that could be considered, they pertain to some of the clearest commonalities found among all three populations, and thus constitute a baseline, however provisional, incomplete and hypothetical, for the exploration of cultural history. The various elements of the baseline should not, of course, be seen as proven facts, but rather as testable hypotheses to be employed as exploratory tools.

Chapter Five considers the relation between the baseline established in the previous chapter and the traditions of various groups of often very differentiated and distinct hunter-gatherers in various parts of the world, with an eye to evaluating the possibility that certain of their traditions might be survivals from the ancestral culture (HBC). An especially important difference will also be stressed: the strongly competitive, violent and warlike characteristics evinced by so many of these groups, in contrast to the largely egalitarian and pacifist traditions of almost all Pygmy and Bushmen societies.

Chapter Six addresses confusing and contradictory notions regarding the lifestyle and values of our so-called “stone-age” ancestors, related to the idea that the popular view of today’s indigenous peoples is some sort of myth, based on romantic notions of “noble savages” living an idyllic, “utopian” existence at one with themselves and nature. To this end, the chapter will begin where the previous one left off, with a further examination of competition and violence among hunter-gatherers.

In this context, I argue that the Pygmy and Bushmen societies on which the baseline is modeled are certainly not Utopias, in the sense of ideal societies where everyone gets along perfectly, women have full equality, disputes are rare, and always settled fairly and without violence. Nevertheless, at least two aspects that stand out as especially important for the developed world, in this time of economic and social turmoil, are well worth noting: first, the avoidance of war, vendetta, or any other type of socially sanctioned violence; second, the imperative toward social equality in terms of individual autonomy, mutual cooperation, and the equitable sharing of goods.

Chapters Seven through Fifteen tell the story of the Out of Africa migration, from the initial exodus across the Red Sea, to the long march along the Asiatic coast, to the subsequent populating of East and Central Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Oceania and the Americas.  In each case, I focus on the manner in which traditions associated with the baseline culture and its music either persisted or were altered in response to outside forces, both environmental and social; forces which have, in turn, given rise to new and, in some cases, highly competitive and violent societies quite different from HBC.

This will not be a smooth progression by any means, since both the musical and genetic evidence reveal a major gap, centered in what is now India, suggesting that, at some point very early on, the Out of Africa migrants must have encountered a catastrophic event, so devastating as to produce a major turning point in human history.

Chapter Sixteen looks backward to consider evolutionary processes that might have led to the development of the musical style on which I’ve been focusing so much attention, reminding us that HBP (the Hypothetical Baseline Population) represents the Most Recent Common Ancestor, not the earliest. It’s only logical to assume, therefore, that HBC must have evolved from simpler practices that preceded it.

This chapter speculates rather broadly on the possibility that the music of the ancestral group might have evolved from an equally interactive, but far less complex, mode of vocalization, resembling the “duetting” and “chorusing” characteristic of certain contemporary ape and gibbon populations, which may well be perpetuating primate “traditions” developed long before the advent of modern humans. In the course of the discussion, some tantalizing clues will be considered, bearing on the origin and evolution of music, its meaning for early humans, and the possibility of a close association with the origin of both religion and language. 

Chapter Seventeen begins with a playful discussion of an ancient Chinese myth, the story of the "Yellow Bell," concerning the creation of a system of tuned pipes that became the basis of not only the Chinese musical system, but some of the most fundamental aspects of Chinese culture generally. My own version of this myth takes us from China to Africa, as I speculate rather broadly on the possible relevance of tuned pipes to the origins of both music and language, ultimately linking this chapter to the previous one as part of a grand evolutionary "metanarrative." This is by far the most speculative chapter in the book, whose value lies more in the possibilities it suggests than any solutions it offers.

The final chapter is an extended meditation on, and response to, the challenging questions posed at the beginning of this introduction: “who were our ancestors, what were they like, what part of their legacy has survived, and what lessons can we derive therefrom?” As such, it will serve as both a retrospective summary of the book as a whole and a forward looking discussion of the role of indigenous peoples in the world of today, with special emphasis on the importance of the ancestral legacy bequeathed to us through their enduring traditions. 

[Added May 20: Some of the chapter numberings and descriptions have been altered to conform with revisions in the text as a whole.]