Sounding the Depths

Sounding the Depths, online and in paperback

2011-08-15T13:53:00.001-04:00

Sounding the Depths is now complete in eighteen chapters, readable either online, as a freely accessible "blog book" -- or as a beautifully bound paperback, available for purchase via CreateSpace or Amazon.com. To read online from the beginning, you may start with the Preface or Introduction -- or go directly to any of the chapters or "sidebars" from the Blog Archive to your right.

After receiving some complaints from people who, like myself, prefer reading from a printed text, I decided it would be a good idea to make a hard copy version available. My task was made especially simple and convenient by a remarkable organization called CreateSpace, which enables authors to publish their own work at minimal cost, thanks to the new "print-on-demand" technology that is transforming the world of publishing.

The paperback contains the complete text, more or less as it appears on this blog, though with a number of relatively minor revisions. However, it doesn't contain, for obvious reasons, any of the audio or video links. Nor does it contain, for reasons not so obvious, most of the figures (photos, maps, diagrams, etc.). As I see it, such materials are covered by the "fair use" provisions of US copyright law, but publishers and their lawyers are running scared these days, so in order to include them in the printed version I'd have needed to obtain permissions for each and every one, an all but impossible task for reasons that should be obvious.

Thus, for the convenience of hard copy readers, I've added two pages to this blog, one containing the Audio-Visual Examples, another containing the Figures. (Both links can be found directly under the Blog Archive.)

The paperback, priced at $18.00, can be ordered from either CreateSpace or Amazon. (If you order from CreateSpace I'll get a larger commission, but you'll get free shipping from Amazon with an order of $25 or more.)

Chapter Eighteen: The Legacy

2011-05-10T16:38:00.032-04:00

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather

Robert Frost, “Directive”

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

BEIJING, April 5, 2004 (Xinhuanet) -- A historical tribute by some 4,000 Chinese from home and abroad paid homage in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, to Xuanyuan Huangdi (the Yellow Emperor) on behalf of more than 1.3 billion Chinese across the globe. The gathering took place outside the legendary emperor's mausoleum, and was a sign of respect to the ancestor of the Chinese nation. . .

The Yellow Emperor, a great tribal chief towards the end of primitive China, was honoured as the ancestor who helped greatly bring Chinese civilization into being. The invention of, among others, the cart, boat, bow and arrow, and Chinese medicine are attributed to him. One of his imperial historians is believed to have created Chinese pictography.

As is evident from the above, the story of the Yellow Emperor and the Yellow Bell is not simply about how an important tradition got started, but is also a story about how a brilliant ancestor went about establishing order, not only in the realm of music, but also economics, law, statehood, the relations between the sexes, and, last but not least, heaven and earth. While he was at it, he also invented important tools, such as the cart, the boat, the bow and arrow, medicines and even pictographic writing. Significantly, the Yellow Emperor is regarded as an ancestor due more to the traditions he established than to any biological functions he may have performed.

One reason I decided to focus on the Yellow Bell myth is because it tells us so much about the nature of both ancestry and tradition, and how closely bound to one another they are. While traditions are what are passed down from generation to generation, it is their association with the ancestors that gives them their meaning and their unique power. What is important, therefore, is not simply to keep a particular tradition going, but to honor the intentions of the ancestor who established it.

Thus the Yellow Bell, which is, after all, simply a length of wooden pipe, must not only be preserved but also, from time to time, replaced, through a process analogous to the process by which it was first established. Similarly, we find in many rituals, both “primitive” and “civilized,” an effort to re-establish the original conditions under which a particular tradition first came into being, as a way of connecting with the ancestor(s) who initiated it. Even in a supposedly modern society like the United States we refer to the Constitution as the ultimate arbiter of all things legal, but need a Supreme Court to continually evaluate and re-evaluate its meaning, so the intentions of the “Founding Fathers” are preserved.

While the Chinese myth places the Yellow Emperor and the Yellow Bell well back into a vaguely defined “olden times,” when China itself was being established as a state, according to my version of the myth tuned pipes originated at a much earlier time, before modern humans voyaged out of Africa -- and well before that, to the time before humans learned to speak to one another. And despite all the many tens of thousands of years from that primeval time to this, we still find ensembles of pipes and panpipes, still cut from lengths of cane, still tuned, in a great many cases (though not all), more or less according to the system described in the story of the Yellow Bell, based on the simple whole number ratios, 2/3 and 4/3.

Remarkably, we still find, all over the world, musical traditions, both instrumental and vocal, based, more or less, on those exact same ratios.¹ And just as the Yellow Bell became the foundation of so much that was central to Chinese civilization, so did the ratios long ago established in the “law of pipes” become the foundation of so much of importance in other civilizations, as, for example, in the pioneering mathematics and physics of the ancient Greeks, where the exact same ratios were “discovered” by Pythagoras.

Such a tradition did not simply come from nowhere. And even though it must have originated well before the existence of China or the Chinese people, as they now define themselves, it most likely did in fact, as the Chinese myth implies, have a very definite beginning, at the hands of a very real, flesh and blood, but also very mysterious “ancestor,” whose identity is shrouded in the mists of deep history.

Which returns us to the questions posed in the Introduction, for which I am now in a position to offer some meaningful, though admittedly speculative, answers: “who were our ancestors, what were they like, what part of their legacy has survived, and what lessons can we derive therefrom?” My responses will give us an opportunity to review some of the most important ideas already covered in preceding chapters.

MRCA

As far as the “who” is concerned, there are in fact a great many ancestors. Our parents are our most recent ancestors, and our grandparents our next most recent. When we speak casually of “our ancestors” we are usually invoking a vaguely defined abstraction, either a long list of ancestors, accumulated over many thousands of years, or else a single founding ancestor or ancestral group that we assume must have existed at some distant point in a now mythical past. Since so many peoples so strongly identify with a particular territory, kingdom or nation, the ancestors that most concern them are invariably associated with specific places, if not specific times.

According to ancient Chinese documents, the Yellow Emperor lived in “olden times,” in Shaanxi Province, well within the boundaries of what is now China. In the Old Testament, we learn that Abraham was the first Jew, thus the ancestor of all Jews. He is said to have lived in Ur of the Chaldees at some time roughly around 2,000 BC. However, the ancestors of Abraham and all other humans living at his time would, from the Old Testament perspective, have to have been Noah and his wife, since all humans other than they and their progeny would have been destroyed in the flood. Moreover, Noah and his family also had ancestors, going all the way back to the Garden of Eden. And before Adam and Eve was “God the Father”, who could be considered the ultimate ancestor, as far as the Judeo/Christian tradition is concerned.

So much for the Chinese and Hebrew traditions -- but just about every society in the world has its ancestors, who in most cases are completely different from one another. One might conclude from this that, as far as mythology is concerned, we are living in a world where every group has its own unique history and its own unique ancestry, tied to the land where it presumably originated.

As far as science is concerned, however, there is a different story to tell. As we've learned, there is now good reason to believe we all ultimately share exactly the same ancestry, known technically as “MRCA,” i.e., the Most Recent Common Ancestors of everyone now living on planet Earth. This is the group I identified in Chapter Four as HBP, or Hypothetical Baseline Population. The notion that such a group might actually have existed in flesh and blood is relatively new, based on genetic research associated with the so-called “Out-of-Africa” model.

The Multiregional View

Anthropological thinking for a great many years was dominated by various versions of a very different theory, known as the “multi-regional” model, which was based largely on “racial” differences, with each of the major “races” originating in a different part of the world, implying either no MRCA at all, or an MRCA so remote in time that it represented little more than an abstraction. According to this model, “Caucasoids” would have descended from European Neanderthals, “Mongoloids” from Asiatic Homo Erectus and “Negroids” from a long line of archaic human and pre-human species in Africa.

Multiregionalism in its purest form holds that almost all human commonalities are due to “convergence,” based on certain evolutionary and/or biological universals, making the development of things like language, music, dance, kinship systems, religion, and even our characteristically “modern” anatomy, the inevitable products of a common destiny shared by archaic humans in widely disparate regions of the world, while “racial” differences can be traced to multiregional origins.

Since such an idealized and in fact racialized view of human history is so strongly at odds with both the genetic evidence and the postmodern zeitgeist generally, it can no longer be seriously maintained. Most multiregionalists have fallen back on a sort of compromise in which the various “racial” groups originated in their respective regions, but exchanged both genes and cultural elements through millions of years of continual cross-continental migration.²

Partly because there is no archaeological evidence for such migrations, partly because the alternative, Out-of-Africa, model is so strongly reinforced by so much of the genetic research, the multiregionalist position has, for the most part, faded into the background. While multiregionalism is nevertheless still vigorously defended by a small but highly active and vocal group, the view of human history presented here is consistent with the mainstream “Out-of-Africa,” or “recent African origin,” model developed over the last 25 years or so by population geneticists, as described in Chapter Two.

A Phylogenetic Model

In contrast to multiregionalism, Out-of-Africa is essentially a phylogenetic model, based on the Darwinian notion of “descent from a common ancestor,” meaning that when we refer to MRCA we are referring to a very specific group that lived at a very specific time and place, and not simply to a theoretical abstraction. As noted in Chapter Two, various estimates date the divergence³of the oldest mitochondrial haplogroups found in modern humans, labeled L0 and L1, to roughly between 90,000 and 150,000 years ago.

And since all haplotypes directly derived from L0 and L1 are found almost exclusively among peoples now living in Africa, it seems reasonable to conclude, as have the great majority of population geneticists, that MRCA most likely lived somewhere on that continent, at some time during the Middle Paleolithic (or Middle “Old Stone Age”). Pretty vague, I admit. But nevertheless something. In fact, much more than we had any reason to expect even 20 or 25 years ago, when population genetics was still in its infancy.

While the dates may be vague, the existence of MRCA is marked by a very specific event, the moment when a group of proto-Bushmen or proto-Pygmies broke away (the technical term is “diverged”) from the population of which they had formerly been a part. This need not have been a momentous occasion, but more likely a relatively minor split, now considered significant only in retrospect. MRCA were thus the population from which this breakaway group diverged. What makes them especially interesting is the fact that they can be characterized, both biologically and culturally, by their status at the moment of divergence.

It must be stressed, however, that MRCA is by no means the end of the line, because they too had ancestors -- and if you want to compare humans with great apes, you can posit an MRCA for these two groups as well – and on down the line: prior to humans, apes and monkeys we find more primitive mammals and prior to them lizards, insects, bacteria, etc., all the way back to the earliest life form, which can be considered the ultimate ancestor.

In a sense, therefore, the question of “who” our ancestors were becomes a kind of tautology: our ancestors are the ones from whom we are descended, all the way back to the beginning of life. But such a definition would never satisfy those many peoples throughout the world for whom the notion of “ancestor” holds such great meaning. As I noted above, we can’t really separate such ancestors from the traditions with which they are associated, which tells us that the traditional notion of “ancestor” is at least as much cultural as biological: the ancestors are simultaneously those from whom we are descended and those from whom our traditions stem.

And if we wish to get beyond the ancestry of any particular group to the common ancestry, both biological and cultural, of all such groups, then we have no choice but to consider the group I’ve been referring to as MRCA. For all practical purposes, the MRCA identified by the geneticists can be regarded as our common ancestors and their culture can be regarded as the source of some of most venerable traditions now being perpetuated among so many societies, both “primitive” and “modern,” of today.

There are, additionally, two other ancestral groups of special importance to the story I’ve been telling: the Out-of-Africa migrants discussed in Chapter Seven, who appear to have been the ancestors of all non-Africans; and what I’ve referred to as the “post-bottleneck” population(s), the earliest survivors of the cataclysmic event hypothesized in Chapters Nine and Ten, which may have triggered much of the large-scale diversity, both “racial” and cultural, we see in the world of today.

So much for the “who.”

What Were They Like?

While the genetic research has identified “mitochondrial Eve” as our most recent common female ancestor, and “Y chromosome Adam” as our most recent common male ancestor, it has nothing to say about what either of them, or the group (or groups) to whom they belonged, were like – in other words, what sort of society were they a part of, and what sort of culture did they possess?

While archaeologists have attempted to reconstruct at least certain aspects of the culture of “early man,” little or no attempt has been made to reconcile the various bits and pieces with one another, not to mention the genetic findings -- and in fact, many of the “bones and stones” they study are from populations whose lineages may well have gone extinct thousands of years ago and can hardly be regarded as “ancestral” as far as any of today’s peoples are concerned.

Which is, as I see it, why the approach I’ve taken in this book is potentially so useful. In the spirit of the revolutionary methods of the population geneticists, I’ve managed to construct a tool for the “excavation” of the ancestral culture by extrapolating backward from the present to some of the deepest recesses of our common history. And while the geneticists have been unable to reconcile “mitochondrial Eve” and “Y chromosome Adam,” who seem to have lived during two very different eras, the Hypothetical Baseline Culture I’ve managed to cobble together (see Chapter Four) points to a single, specific ancestral society, which in all likelihood existed prior to the L0-L1 divergence, and appears, on the basis of my “triangulation” method, to have maintained (if not necessarily originated) certain highly distinctive and uniquely interesting cultural traits and traditions.

A Lost History

While the whole idea of extrapolating backward from present to past has been anathema to most anthropologists for some time, I am not completely alone. In a similar spirit, and informed by essentially the same set of genetic findings, Nicholas Wade’s Before the Dawn:Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (2006) is equally ambitious in its attempt to reconstruct ancestral culture. Wade’s logic is simple and convincing:

[S]ince people in societies around the world behave in much the same way, the principal elements of human nature must already have been present in the ancestral human population before its dispersal into Africa and the world beyond.

Despite the fact that “not a trace of these first people has yet been found by archaeologists,” nevertheless, “a surprising amount can now be inferred . . .” (p. 52 – my emphasis).

By analyzing the behaviors common to societies around the world, particularly the hunter-gatherers who seem closest to the ancestral people, anthropologists can describe how the ancestral population probably lived and what its people were like. (ibid.)

In elaborating his theory, Wade points to two very interesting “ways of developing a portrait of the ancestral human population; one is through the Universal People, the other through the Real People.” He first considers “universal human behaviors” ranging from “cooking, dance and divination to fear of snakes” facial expressions, and, more importantly, language, all “found in societies throughout the world . . .” (p. 65) He goes on to list a range of behaviors and traditions apparently shared by all peoples and thus likely to have been a part of ancestral culture.

In addition to the Universal People, it is possible to consider a very specific group of Real People, such as the “San,” i.e., Bushmen, who “as members of the L1 [actually it’s L0] branch of the mitochondrial tree may be the closest living approximation to the ancestral human population” (p.66). As you can see, Wade’s thinking is in some ways remarkably similar to my own. Indeed, as he paints a fairly detailed portrait of the !Kung San (aka Ju/’hoansi) Bushmen, he lists many of the same characteristics highlighted in these pages, especially chapters Three and Four.

Of course, he is not so naïve as to assume that everything we find in Bushmen culture can be attributed to the ancestral population, and in the following section, entitled “Ancestral Portrait,” he judiciously weighs the possible differences. As he does so, however, some limitations of his approach become evident.

In contrast to the many specific, well documented details of !Kung life he’s already enumerated, his “Ancestral Portrait” is highly speculative and vague, based on untested and in certain cases inaccurate assumptions. Clearly the !Kung in and of themselves cannot be a reliable model, because we have no way of knowing the degree to which any aspect of their culture is due to the specific conditions under which they now live. For example: does their communal reciprocity stem from an ancestral tradition, or is it simply a strategy for holding the community together in the face of a harsh, resource-scarce, desert environment?

As far as the Universal People are concerned, while it’s true that many elements of culture do in fact seem universal, it would take a very ambitious research project to confirm that. Do we really know that cooking, dance, divination, fear of snakes, standardized facial expressions, etc. are found in literally every society, or even a significant majority? How could we go about testing such a hypothesis?

Moreover, it is by no means self-evident that the absence of a certain trait in certain societies means it must have been absent in the ancestral society. Wade rules bows and arrows out because we don’t find them among the Australian aborigines without considering the possibility that this technology could have been lost at some point in their history, for any number of reasons.

The most serious problem I have with Wade’s approach is his continual reliance on the behavior of “hunter-gatherers” as an index of ancestral culture. As we learned in Chapter Five, there are a great many different types of hunter-gatherers, with a wide variety of often very different value systems and survival strategies. And, again, as with the Universal People, any attempt to identify cultural elements held in common by all or even most hunter-gatherer societies would require a research project of major proportions.

The dangers of such an approach become especially evident when he concludes that the ancestral people must have “engaged in constant warfare, defending their own territory or raiding that of neighbors” (p. 74), because he sees strong evidence of violence and endemic warfare among such “hunter-gatherer” groups as the Australian Aborigines, the tribal peoples of New Guinea, the natives of the Andaman Islands, the Yanomamo of Brazil, etc., supplemented by widespread evidence of head-hunting and cannibalism throughout the hunter-gatherer world.

As far as the allegedly “harmless” Bushmen are concerned, he cites reliable evidence that “the San fought regularly with their pastoralist Bantu neighbors” and were found to have an internal homicide rate “some three times that of even the United States.”

According to Wade, the tendency of the ancestral people, and, by implication, humans generally, to engage in territorial aggression, warfare and raiding, was hard wired into their genes as a legacy from our primate ancestors. Such a conclusion might seem odd in light of the fact that the great majority of today’s primates do not engage in such behavior, but Wade has chosen to focus his attention on chimpanzees, the only other creatures in the animal kingdom⁴

with “a strong propensity to kill their own kind” (p. 148). Since Wade is already convinced that the earliest humans were inherently violent and warlike, he has little problem deriving such behavior from a “joint human-chimp ancestor” (p. 141).

Methodological Issues

Wade’s book is an intelligent, well written and perceptive overview of a large body of meaningful evidence, including some of the most recent genetic research, pertaining to a great many important aspects of human culture and evolution, and on that level I highly recommend it. I take exception, however, to the methodology he has employed in his attempt to recreate the ancestral culture, which is, as I see it, far too vague, and far too dependent on untestable or inadequately tested assumptions – notably the assumption that certain commonalities in the behavior of today’s “hunter-gatherers” can be extrapolated into the behavior of a common ancestor. Especially problematic is the repeated harping on a supposedly inherent human tendency toward violence, which I find both misleading and potentially harmful.

Why am I so convinced Wade must be wrong? All the issues raised above have been extensively discussed in these pages, especially Chapters Four, Five and Six. In Chapter Four, I explicitly question the tendency of many anthropologists

to lump all hunter-gatherers together, as though there were some universal ahistorical force that unites them, simply because they maintain hunting and gathering traditions. As we will learn from the following chapter, this is far from the case. All ‘immediate-return’ societies do not, in fact, look alike.

In Chapter Five, as promised, I describe a wide variety of different hunter-gatherer societies (including some of the simple “horticulturalists” included on Wade’s list, who share many forager characteristics), with a range of very different behaviors and social structures, from some, like the Pygmies, Bushmen and Hadza, who are acephalous, egalitarian, communal and relatively non-violent, to others, such as the New Guinea tribes cited by Wade, dominated by aggressive “Big Men,” characterized by fierce competition for status and endemic warfare. As I concluded, it is a mistake to “accept the commonly held view of ‘hunter-gatherers’ as representative . . . of some sort of universalized essence of ‘Stone-Age Man’.”

In Chapter Four, under the heading “Core Values,” I distinguish between violent behavior, as found among certain individuals in literally all societies, and institutionalized violence, in which violence is woven into the fabric of the society as a whole, where it is both tolerated and in many cases encouraged. The three populations I’ve drawn on to produce the baseline ancestral culture outlined in Chapter Four lack any of the trappings one would expect to find in such a society (see below).

In Chapter Six, I explicitly address the unfortunate comparison between early humans and chimpanzees, which can be sourced to a highly influential, but seriously misleading book, Demonic Males, by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson. As does Wade, the authors assume that all hunter-gatherers have always engaged in endemic warfare, which makes the comparison with the aggressive and violent behavior of male chimpanzees seem particularly apt. While noting that bonobos, close cousins of chimps, have a very different, essentially non-violent, culture, the authors’ preconceived notions of what our “Stone-Age” ancestors must have been like make the comparison with chimps seem far more likely.

The theories of Wrangham and Peterson have been widely accepted and are exerting a significant influence on many of our leading thinkers. An especially disturbing example can be found in a recently published book by the well known political scientist Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order, a work which is sure to have a powerful influence on decision makers throughout the world. A key section of Fukuyama’s book is in fact titled “Chimpanzee Politics and its Relevance to Human Political Development.”

According to Fukuyama, who confidently cites Wrangham as a basic source, “[we] know that both human beings and modern chimpanzees are descended from a common chimplike ancestor . . .”
He continues, noting, reasonably enough, that our earliest human ancestors were, like Chimpanzees, highly social (as indeed are many of their primate cousins), making the perfectly valid point that sociability has most likely been a part of human nature from the beginning.

Even more significant, in his view, is the observation, again based on Wrangham, that chimpanzee behavior is inherently violent, with “groups of male chimpanzees in the wild ranging beyond their territories to attack and kill chimps from neighboring communities” (p. 31). On this basis, and this basis alone, he ultimately concludes, with equal confidence, that “violence is rooted in human nature,” as “one of the most important points of continuity between ancestral apes and human beings,” thus endorsing Hobbes’ famous dictum “that the state of nature was a state of war of ‘every man against every man.’” This dubious conclusion becomes the fundamental basis for a theory of socio-political evolution colored throughout by a highly cynical, deeply pessimistic view of human nature.

I cannot agree, and find such conclusions alarming, to say the least. As I wrote in Chapter Six,

the Pygmy and Bushmen groups on whose traditions I’ve drawn for the construction of an ancestral baseline, are nothing like chimps. Indeed, when we examine those cultural elements shared by so many Pygmy and Bushmen groups . . . [it] looks, in fact, as though our ancestors were closer to bonobos than chimps.

Since writing this passage, I’ve come across a remarkable video that makes my point quite dramatically: Video Example 13: Bonobos Like to Share.

The "subject" is not only willing to share, but goes to the trouble of unlocking another Bonobo's cage to make sure his pal can also get to the food.

Compare with the following description of Aka Pygmy sharing, by Michelle Kisliuk:

On another occasion I brought a tomato to the Bagandou camp . . . I gave a wedge to Bandit sitting beside me, expecting him to pop it in his mouth. Instead, he proceeded to call for a knife and cut the wedge into about sixteen tiny pieces, sharing it with everybody in sight (Seize the Dance, p. 132).

There are many other notable similarities between bonobo culture and the baseline culture I constructed in Chapter Four, including synchronized vocal interlock, female assertiveness, non-hierarchical political structure and yes, most certainly, a tendency to avoid violent behavior, none of which are characteristic of chimpanzees. Thus, one way of answering the question of what our ancestors were like might be, very simply: bonobos!

The HBC Model

In attempting to paint a relatively comprehensive picture of our common ancestry, we must first, as we have seen, reject theories based on universals and/or “hunter-gatherer” behaviors and customs, including the notion that MRCA must, like chimpanzees, have been inherently violent and warlike.

The long neglected musical evidence presented in Chapters One and Three has led us to a very different conclusion, based on a radically different approach, as elucidated in Chapter Four. Thanks to an important clue provided by the remarkable affinities between the highly distinctive musical traditions of those populations in the world with the deepest lineages, the African Pygmies and Bushmen, coupled with the equally remarkable manner in which the organization and performance style of their music reflects certain key elements of the social organization and cultural values of both groups, it has been possible to move out from the realm of music to the realm of culture generally, to speculate meaningfully on what the common ancestors of the Pygmies and Bushmen might have been like.

And since the genetic evidence so strongly suggests that the common ancestors of these two groups are the common ancestors of everyone else as well, we have opened the door to a meaningful (though necessarily provisional) consideration of what MRCA might have been like.

For a full accounting see Chapter Four, where you’ll find a listing headed “The HBC Model Thus Far.” Briefly, what my triangulation method reveals is an ancestral culture that is, in some ways, almost embarrassingly “Utopian,” with an economy very close to what Marx called “primitive communism”; a non-hierarchical, acephalous, highly egalitarian political structure based on close interpersonal cooperation rather than coercion by leaders; a high degree of both group integration and personal freedom; a spiritual life refreshingly free of dogma or institutionalized thinking; a “complementary” relation between the sexes, in which women are relatively, though certainly not completely, equal to men; finally, despite a high degree of interpersonal contentiousness coupled with occasional episodes of violent behavior, we see no sign of institutionalized violence.

While certain Pygmy or Bushmen individuals have acted violently, and certain Pygmy or Bushmen groups have, from time to time, engaged in warfare (invariably stemming from relatively recent external pressures), “[w]hat we do not see, and would not therefore expect to find in HBC, are evidences of: cannibalism, head-hunting, endemic warfare, exploitation of women or children, female mutilation, prostitution, slavery, blood-feuds, raiding.”

Migrants, Bottlenecks and the Origins of Institutionalized Violence

As for the two other ancestral groups considered in this volume, I’ve made an effort to characterize the Out-of-Africa migrants in Chapter Seven, where my ideas regarding their culture are summarized in an extensive table (see Table One), while the socio-cultural effects of the bottleneck event hypothesized in Chapter Ten are considered under the heading “The Toba Effect.”

While there are many fascinating things to consider regarding the nature of both the migrants and the post-bottleneck survivors, one single issue looms largest for me: the origins of violence and warfare -- or to be more specific, institutionalized violence and endemic warfare. Since I cannot agree with the now widely held view that violence is programmed into our genes, and see no evidence that MRCA either encouraged or tolerated it, then, as far as I am concerned, the origins of violence and warfare as socially sanctioned behaviors are yet to be determined. Initially I planned to devote a chapter to this problem, but ultimately decided against it simply because I lacked the time and resources to do the necessary research, and didn’t want to wander off too far into the realm of vague speculation. Nevertheless, the topic is of sufficient interest and importance as to warrant a certain amount of discussion here, however incomplete and tentative.

Assuming I am correct about the essentially pacifist nature of HBP, then the next question for us to consider is whether the Out-of-Africa migrants (HMP) shared similar values or, at some time prior to their African exodus, had adopted the very different values of a warlike society. As I noted in Chapter Seven, geneticist Eduardo Moreno has argued in favor of the latter alternative, referring to them as “The Migrant Warriors that Colonized the World” (Moreno 2010). Moreno’s work is of special interest to me since he has approached such issues from a perspective so close to my own.

To review some of the points already made in Chapter Seven:

Moreno sees no correlation between those populations characterized by the ancestral mitochondrial haplogroups L0, L1 or L2 (mostly African Bushmen or Pygmies) and a warlike ethos, supporting my view that our common ancestors were essentially non-violent. On the other hand, he does find such a correlation with hunter-gatherer groups carrying haplogroup L3, and its M and N descendents, who tend to exhibit either patently warlike behavior or the presence of competitive rituals, games, etc. that appear consistent with an essentially warlike value system. On this basis, he arrives at the conclusion that the high degree of violent behavior so characteristic of so many non-African hunter-gatherers is most likely due to cultural values inherited from their L3 ancestors, the Out-of-Africa migrants.

At this stage, I’m not completely convinced, though I find Moreno’s approach impressively original, sympathetic and promising. There are too many hunter-gatherers in too many different parts of the world who are distinctly non-warlike, regardless of whether they might or might not engage in competitive rituals or games. Moreno’s focus on such competitions is nevertheless suggestive and certainly deserves further consideration, but as I see it, there is not yet enough evidence available on which to base a strong hypothesis one way or the other.

If in fact HMP had retained the values of their HBP ancestors and were not warlike, that could possibly account for the many non-African hunter-gatherer groups that have traditionally tended to avoid violence, and would, moreover, explain why so many have apparently retreated into marginal “refuge areas,” such as forests, islands and mountains, where they have, until recently, been able to pursue their traditions in relative peace. If that is the case, however, then we are still left with the question of where, and how, very different traditions supporting institutionalized violence originated.

Tradition!

As I see it, in order to understand the origins of socially sanctioned violence, regardless of where or when it originated, we need to arrive at a clearer understanding of traditions in general, how they originate, the manner in which they are propagated, and the conditions under which they can be altered. And since the lasting power of age-old traditions over the human mind and psyche has been a persistent theme throughout this book, it makes sense, at this point, to do some reviewing.

As the musical evidence considered in Chapter One so strongly suggests, certain traditions can persist essentially intact for tens of thousands of years. While such a conclusion is certain to trigger skepticism among social scientists, the evidence (see especially Appendix A) cannot be ignored. And if we are willing to consider such a conclusion, however provisionally, then we are faced with the question of why certain traditions fail to “evolve” or “develop” while others apparently do.

I deal with this question in its most general form in the first “Sidebar,” under the heading “Cultural Continuity.” While this analysis is presented as “preliminary,” it is, in fact, based on conclusions drawn as a result of all the research that went into this book, which convinced me that the traditional approach to continuity and change is based on a serious oversimplification of both culture and history.

As I see it, there is no such thing as “cultural evolution” in the sense of some sort of inbred, natural tendency for traditions to change over time. “Cultural drift,” when it does occur, almost always pertains to relatively superficial elements, such as, for example, all the many variants we can find of a particular folk song as it makes its way through both time and space. When we consider deeper issues of musical style and structure, which was, of course, Alan Lomax’s great innovation, we see no significant change at all.

Thus we find the salient characteristics of, say, ballad style, remaining virtually unchanged from country to country and even continent to continent, implying relative stasis over many thousands of years. The same is true of more practical traditions such as, say, archery, where we find many different types of bow and arrow developing over the centuries while the basic principle remains precisely the same.

According to this model, real change, when it does occur, is due either to external forces, such as natural disasters, wars, or the influence of neighboring groups; or, in the case of more highly developed societies, the desires (or whims) of powerful leaders, or competition among specialists, which can drive innovation. In the case of non-specialized hunter-gatherer societies, the origin of traditions supporting violence cannot be due to powerful leaders, as such societies are typically acephalous, nor competition among specialists, since there are no specialists; nor can it be due to war, or the influence of neighboring societies with a warlike culture, since we are considering the origin of such a culture, which would not yet have existed elsewhere. It seems logical, therefore, to look for the origin of institutionalized violence in the effects of a natural disaster. Which is one reason I’ve attached such great importance to the “bottleneck event” highlighted in Chapter Ten.

Whether produced by the Toba eruption or some other comparably significant occurrence, the effects of a major ecological disaster, as we well know from recent experiences with floods, earthquakes and tsunamis, could have been profound and lasting. Under such conditions, as I wrote in Chapter Ten,

Instead of an egalitarian ethic, steeped in non-violence, a new system of values, based on the survival of the strongest, most assertive and most competitive individuals, and their subservient followers, could emerge. Once such a tradition is established, it would be almost impossible to go back to the old way of doing things and even of thinking. Even if things might improve over time, to the point that the society is no longer stressed, and no longer dependent on strong, aggressive leaders, it might not matter, because traditions tend to perpetuate themselves long after they have lost their original purpose and even their meaning.

Thus, if under dire circumstances, a situation is created whereby only the most aggressive and violent individuals are likely to survive, then, as I see it, we have good reason to expect that traditions supporting competitive, violent and warlike behavior could suddenly emerge from an originally nonviolent base. And once such traditions are established, then, as I’ve argued above, they will tend to persist indefinitely until they, in turn, are confronted with a more powerful external event or influence.

Whether such a theory is adequate as an explanation of the origin of violence remains to be seen. As I stated above, much more evidence would be necessary before any firm conclusion could be reached. Nevertheless, from evidence presented in Chapters Ten through Fifteen, there is good reason to see the bottleneck event as a major turning point, both biological and cultural, for large segments of the human race, for whom the bottleneck survivors would have constituted an especially significant ancestry.

The Legacy

Now that we have a clearer (or more confused?) notion of who our ancestors were and what they were like, we can move on to the next question: what part of their legacy has survived? And here I must admit to having begged the question, because it’s not at all self-evident to what extent any such survivals could be regarded as a “legacy,” rather than a simple curiosity, of interest only to antiquarians.

Here’s how I put my feelings a few years ago, in an essay entitled Echoes of Our Forgotten Ancestors:

The highly integrated, interlocked, freely polyphonic, improvised and playfully hocketed yodeling of the various Pygmy and Bushman groups of Africa would seem to constitute a perfect reflection of their social order: intensely group oriented, but also individualized—acephelous, egalitarian, more or less gender equal. . . If humankind is, indeed, “innately” aggressive, violent, and competitive, that information seems never to have reached the gentle aborigines of Africa.

Can the Pygmy/Bushman model be applied to the earliest musical and social state of homo sapiens sapiens, prior to its “Out-of-Africa” adventure? If true, such a finding would be of immense importance, not only to ethnomusicology and anthropology, but all of us, simply as human beings—which is to say: as the inheritors of a certain legacy—of cooperation as opposed to competition; gentleness and mutual support as opposed to aggression and violence—a legacy of interactive play, pleasure—and joy. (Grauer 2006, p. 44)

Is there evidence that any aspects of such a legacy could have indeed survived to the current era? My answer is, very simply: yes. For one thing, this book itself is based on the premise that such survivals exist. If I saw no indication of that, then I’d have had nothing to work with in extrapolating backward from the present to the past. What we see as we look around us on a global scale is abundant evidence of survivals from a long distant past, most obviously in the cultures of so-called “indigenous” societies, which, until very recently, were still very much alive and if not thriving, then at least managing, and in many cases struggling, to preserve at least some of their most valued traditions.

What I see in each of these societies is a kind of palimpsest, i.e., an overlay, of sometimes very different and even contradictory cultural elements. And in this palimpsest it is often possible to identify traditions stemming from the three ancestral sources I’ve highlighted in these pages: HBC, the Hypothetical Baseline Culture of our most recent common ancestors (MRCA); HMC, the Hypothetical Migrant Culture of the Out-of-Africa migrants; and, finally, a culture, or group of cultures, originating, as I suspect, in some of the profound changes stemming from the “Bottleneck” event discussed in Chapters Nine and Ten. The most recent layer, is, of course, the layer formed by the profound and often negative influence of the more “advanced” cultural forces now impinging on them. As I see it, none of these layers has been entirely lost when “supplanted” by the next, which is one of the reasons such societies can seem so complex and contradictory to outsiders.

Let me now pose a particularly challenging question, especially meaningful, I’d imagine, to those reading here: Can we tease out the various layers of such a palimpsest from the so-called “developed” world, the society of automobiles, airplanes, computers, cell phones and Internet blogs? In other words, does the story I’ve been telling in these pages have any immediate relevance for us? Is the ancestral legacy our legacy too, or largely a matter for professional anthropologists and the indigenous peoples they study?

As far as music is concerned, I’ve pointed, in Chapter Twelve, to signs of the “African Signature” in Europe, not only in certain folk traditions featuring vocal interlock, hocket and canon, but in the liturgy of the medieval church, clearly influenced by some of these traditions, for which such vocal interplay became common, forming one basis for the development of the polyphony we now take for granted in the “classical” tradition to which it gave rise. I confess that, now that I’m attuned to it, I hear a great many “echoes” of Pygmy/Bushmen style in the classical music I love, from Medieval motets, to Renaissance madrigals, Bach fugues, Beethoven string quartets, all the way to “modernist” works, such as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the intricately hocketed counterpoints of Webern, Boulez, Berio, Stockhausen, etc. I hear it in much popular music as well, including Hip Hop. Especially Hip Hop. But this is another story for another day.

I sometimes wonder whether the ideals that now form the basis of modern democracy could be a part of that same legacy. Notions such as “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” or “all men are created equal,” supposedly stemming from the Eighteenth Century European “Enlightenment,” are perfectly in tune with the “Utopian” values of the ancestral culture I’ve postulated. If such values are indeed at the basis of a common cultural ancestry, and if, as I’ve argued, our most valued traditions tend to persist, even in the face of the most powerful and persistent obstacles, then the egalitarian values of our ancestors, like their egalitarian music, may have persisted unnoticed and unrecognized in the psyches of countless individuals who, under even the most oppressive conditions, have persisted in their belief that a luminous “golden age” of equality and freedom might someday return.

Such thinking has been sternly rejected of late, as part of a reaction against supposedly naïve and romantic characterizations of indigenous peoples. To choose one example among many, here is Roy Grinker commenting on views expressed in Colin Turnbull’s popular, The Forest People:

The Forest People . . . is in many ways a thinly veiled attempt to use the idea of the "Pygmies" as a way to make universally valid statements about human nature. Turnbull played upon a deep-seated need throughout much of the West to invent a "primitive" and original form of human society, and toward this goal he draws an idealized picture of the Mbuti living a romantic and harmonious life in the bountiful rain forest of the Congo (Houses in the Rain Forest, 1994:6).

A similar view is expressed by Francis Fukuyama, in the book referenced above:

The idea that violence is rooted in human nature is difficult for many people to accept. Many anthropologists, in particular, are committed, like Rousseau, to the view that violence is an invention of later civilizations, just as many people would like to believe that early societies understood how to live in balance with their local environments. Unfortunately, there is little evidence to support either view. (The Origins of Political Order, p. 73)

Aside from the fact that, as I have demonstrated, there is indeed considerable evidence to support such views, both Grinker and Fukuyama fail to address a key question that goes to the heart of the issues they’ve raised. If in fact there is “a deep-seated need . . . to invent a ‘primitive’ and original form of human society,” and if “the idea that violence is rooted in human nature is difficult for many people to accept,” one is tempted to ask: why? Why is it that so many people in our society have such a “deep-seated need” to think in such idealized terms, and why is it so “difficult for many people to accept” that humans are, at base, cold-blooded killers? If human nature is as essentially ruthless as Fukuyama claims, then one would assume the great majority of humans everywhere would have no problem at all with such characterizations, and in fact point to them with Klingon-like pride.

If most people have a “deep-seated need” to idealize certain indigenous societies as “primitive and original” “noble savages,” one can only wonder where that need comes from. What is there in us that responds so strongly to stories, books and movies about the adventure filled, freewheeling lifestyles of Tropical Forest Pygmies, Bushmen of the Kalahari, Hadza, etc.? Are such values the product, simply, of overactive imaginations? Or might they themselves be survivals from our distant past? Could what Carl Jung once referred to as the “collective unconscious,” an innate, universal feature of the human psyche, be better understood as an “historical unconscious,” located not so much in the human mind, as in the vast field of culturally transmitted norms and values that condition it?

In this regard, I suspect that some of the most fundamental values may have always been conveyed most powerfully and effectively through music. While certainly not a “universal language” in the sense once generally accepted in the West, music does have certain unique properties that make it an especially effective communicative tool, even across the most profound cultural and social divides. Despite the media dominance of pop, rock, country, hip-hop etc., many different kinds of music are enthusiastically appreciated and even cultivated in our society, to the point that recordings of some of the most esoteric musical practices from the most remote corners of the world have been widely available for many years.

Because of its unique properties and extraordinarily important social role, music has been widely documented in a manner that is special, totally unlike just about any other type of human behaviour one could name. Listening with an open mind for ancestral echoes still present in the authentic music of the traditional peoples of today may be the first step toward the understanding and appreciation of a long neglected, infinitely valuable, legacy.

Cultural Equity

Assuming a portion of our ancestral legacy has survived, we must now deal with the final question: what lessons can we derive therefrom? No one worked harder to convince the world of the importance of such a question than the controversial father of Cantometrics, Alan Lomax. The phrase “Cultural Equity” was coined by Lomax in a seminal essay of 1972 (An Appeal for Cultural Equity, World of Music, XIV [2] 1972), in which he identified a cultural “grey-out,” destined to “fill our human skies with the smog of the phoney and cut the families of men off from a vision of their own cultural constellations.” He descried an “over-centralized electronic communication system” that was “imposing a few standardized, mass‑produced and cheapened cultures everywhere,” promoting “the swift destruction of culture patterns all over the planet.”

As one might expect, musical traditions played a special role for Lomax, who had devoted so much of his time and energy to their preservation:

Scientific study of cultures, notably of their languages and their musics, shows that all are equally expressive and equally communicative. They are also equally valuable; first, because they enrich the lives of the culture or people who employ them and whose psychic balance is threatened when they are destroyed or impoverished; second, because each communicative system . . . holds important discoveries about the natural and human environment; and third, because each is a treasure of unknown potential, a collective creation in which some branch of the human species invested its genius across the centuries. . . [Thus, we are in danger of destroying] a system of interaction, of fantasy and symbolizing which, in the future, the human race may sorely need.

While Lomax saw cultural equity in terms of justice and equality, I wonder whether he also considered that other meaning of the term “equity,” the one that’s used when we invest in a stock. As he had strong socialist sympathies, this notion, with its capitalist overtones, may not have appealed to him. But aren’t the traditions Lomax championed a kind of equity in that sense as well, as a sort of “common stock” in which our ancestors have been investing since the dawn of humanity, and in which we all share an interest?

In that case, what’s at stake is not only a matter of fairness, equal justice for all modes of cultural expression, as important as that surely is, but the preservation of a common heritage, an infinitely precious cultural legacy of incalculable value to every living human being. As Lomax implies several times in his essay, there is a strong analogy at work linking our efforts to preserve the natural environment, all but universally applauded, with the need for similar efforts on the cultural front, equally important for the well being of our human environment, but unfortunately far less well understood.

Are Indigenous Cultures “Frozen in Time”?

If by "cultural equity" we simply mean "fairness" to various and sundry remote and exotic cultures, each seen as both unique and also set apart, "frozen in time" in a world of its own, then one might feel a responsibility to preserve each of these separate worlds in its own pristine "authenticity." If, however, we see "cultural equity" as something in which we too hold a stake (i.e., equity), as a spiritual investment made by generations of ancestors, going all the way back to the beginnings of our species -- which, as I’ve been arguing, does appear to have a common source, and, therefore, a common cultural heritage -- then we cannot separate indigenous peoples off from ourselves in exotic and remote worlds of their own, but must see them as part of a dynamic ongoing process that concerns everyone now alive -- and our descendants after us. This is especially significant in view of the fact that it is the same so-called “indigenes” who have been most concerned, if not obsessed, with both the preservation and cultivation of tradition. These are the ones whose lessons we must be prepared to learn if we are to profit from the “equity” that’s been accumulating for so many generations.

All well and good, one might say, but when we get down to specifics we seem to be confronted with an enormous number of totally different traditions, each appearing to us as something rigid, indeed "'frozen in time," sometimes irrational, often fragile and even brittle, difficult to understand and even more difficult, therefore, to connect with. While I’ve been emphasizing that which is admirable in our ancestral traditions, it’s impossible to deny that in many cases there is a dark side as well.

Indeed, tradition can be a force for repression, control, exploitation and a host of other practices that many find disturbing, if not evil. The problem is indeed immense, and there are many different ways of addressing it. The path I’ve been following here represents my own effort to dig down deeply enough through all the historical and cultural clutter to find something we can all agree is worth not only studying and learning from, but also preserving, encouraging and developing. Once we arrive at this point, we may be surprised to see traces of this ancient heritage cropping up in many unexpected places.

A good example might be the young girl in the film "Whale Rider," who identifies so strongly with her Maori heritage, in spite of the opposition of tribal "traditionalists," even her own grandfather, who object to her activities because females have traditionally been excluded from playing the roles to which she so longingly aspires. I think that story has great meaning for those who are trying to sort out what is valuable about tradition, what is destructive about it, and why the differences are so important.

What is especially interesting to contemplate is whether the girl represents tradition or is resisting it. On the one hand, she is attempting to overthrow age-old traditions by doing the sort of things usually reserved for males. On the other hand she appears to be the only young person in the village with a real interest in perpetuating the very traditions threatened by her involvement in them.

As I see it, this story can be understood not so much as an opposition between generations, or a new or old way of seeing things, but as the opposition between certain relatively new traditions (new, that is, from the perspective of deep history), concerned primarily with social control, which have, indeed, become frozen in time; and older, more fundamental traditions stemming from a much deeper cultural layer, which promote social integration, fairness, equality -- and adaptation to new and different conditions where appropriate. The elders are trapped in the former, while the girl is tuned in to the latter and behaves accordingly -- in a manner that eventually wins the day, transforming the consciousness of all involved, including the film’s viewers -- one of which, I'm pleased to say, was me.

An Economics Lesson

There is one more lesson to be learned, a lesson of special relevance at this particular moment in history, when our economic system appears on the verge of collapse, and our way of life with it. One of the basic principles of classical economics is that all humans are ultimately, whether we like to admit it or not, motivated by self-interest, which in turn drives competition, the basis for our “free market economy.” This is a view once widely, and uncritically, accepted in the post-Soviet, “free market” driven world of today. Here's one particularly clear statement of what was, until recently, regarded as unquestionable wisdom, from a 1995 article by Mark Perry, entitled Why Socialism Failed:

In a capitalist economy, incentives are of the utmost importance. Market prices, the profit-and-loss system of accounting, and private property rights provide an efficient, interrelated system of incentives to guide and direct economic behavior. Capitalism is based on the theory that incentives matter!

Why do incentives matter? Human nature, for one thing: “By failing to emphasize incentives, socialism is a theory inconsistent with human nature and is therefore doomed to fail.” For another, the need for maximum efficiency due to the scarcity of resources: “In a world of scarcity it is essential for an economic system to be based on a clear incentive structure to promote economic efficiency.” Which leads, inevitably, to competition: “Without competition, centrally planned economies do not have an effective incentive structure to coordinate economic activity.” Thus, “Without incentives the results are a spiraling cycle of poverty and misery.”

Yet, as has been clear to those who have studied the Pygmies and Bushmen of Africa, their remarkable societies appear, through most of their history, to have lived collectively, sharing goods on an equal basis, shunning competition, and yet managing to survive peacefully and harmoniously among themselves, for the most part, with little if any trace of regimentation or coercion, for what now appears to have been literally tens of thousands of years!

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, in her book The Old Way, writes with glowing admiration of the !Kung Bushmen's “almost obsessive sense of equality and sharing. . . In daily matters, sharing was the way of life. Everybody shared” (p. 108).

If sharing can be a way of life for societies that have flourished for tens of thousands of years, then a need for personal incentives based on competition cannot be grounded in “human nature.”
And if life in the Kalahari desert, where Bushmen groups have survived for centuries at least, is marked by extreme scarcity of both food and water, then Perry's assertion that “In a world of scarcity it is essential for an economic system to be based on a clear incentive structure to promote economic efficiency” cannot be true.

Why is this important? Because, as we now know, it is not only Soviet style socialism that has collapsed, but also the brand of “free market capitalism” so enthusiastically promoted by Perry -- and so many others.

Perry was able to conclude, with some confidence, back in 1995:

Capitalism will play a major role in the global revival of liberty and prosperity because it nurtures the human spirit, inspires human creativity, and promotes the spirit of enterprise. By providing a powerful system of incentives that promote thrift, hard work, and efficiency, capitalism creates wealth.

The main difference between capitalism and socialism is this: Capitalism works.

Which reminds me of those famous words of Gordon Gekko: “Greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works.” As we now know, to our sorrow and grief, Perry was not only wrong about societies “where all things are held in common,” to quote More’s Utopia. He was also wrong about the capitalist Utopia he was promoting. “Free market” capitalism does not work. Greed does not work, and therefore cannot be good for anything at all. Despite the continual litany of complaints and rollings of the eyes we've been getting for so long from fashionably revisionist academics, there is something we can learn from those “primitive” Pygmies and Bushmen after all. The only question is: will the message reach us in time?

1. It has often been argued that these ratios are derived from the harmonic overtone series, which would explain their universality as a manifestation of “nature,” rather than the perpetuation of a human tradition. If this were the case, however, then we would expect to find these same ratios employed throughout the natural world, in the vocalizations of all sorts of animals, and especially the songs of birds. But that is not the case. In fact, humans are the only animals who use them.

2. For a vigorously argued presentation of this version of multiregionalism, see Alan Templeton, “Out of Africa again and again,” Nature, 416 , 2002.

3. Estimations of genetic divergence dates are based on a technique known as “coalescence.” For a definition and discussion of this topic, see the online Wikipedia article on Coalescent Theory.

4. According to evolutionary biologists Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, as already quoted in Chapter Six, “Out of four thousand mammals and ten million or more other animal species, this suite of [violent and warlike] behaviors is known only among chimpanzees and humans. . .” (Demonic Males, p. 24).

Chapter Seventeen: In Olden Times

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The Law of Pipes

In olden times Huang-ti ordered Ling Lun to establish the lü. Ling Lun travelled from the western to the shady northern side of Mount Yuan Yü. He selected bamboo grown in the Chieh Ch'i valley. He chose only a piece which was hollow and of even thickness. He cut off its knots and used the hollow section between the two joints, the length of which was 3.9 ts'un. And he blew the pipe and produced the sound kung of huang-chung. He then brought twelve other pipes of different lengths down from the mountain and he listened to the sounds of the male and female Phoenix birds. He grouped their sounds into the twelve lü. There were six sounds of the male bird, and another six of the female. He related them to the kung of the huang-chung and found that the huang-chung was the foundation of the lü-lü. [as quoted in "Myth and Reality in the Theory of Chinese Tonal System," by János Kárpáti -- Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, T. 22, Fasc. 1/4. (1980), pp. 5-14.

In order to understand the above passage, it is necessary, first of all, to realize that the syllable lü has different meanings, marked by different written characters, depending on the pitch with which it is spoken. Two of these meanings are: “law” and “pipe.” Thus, the well-known Chinese myth of the Yellow Bell (huang-chung) is based on either an amusing pun or a hilarious misunderstanding. The Yellow Emporer, Huang-ti ordered Ling Lun to establish the law but what he actually comes up with is a pipe. Which suggests that the person credited with determining the tunings which were to become the basis of the Chinese tonal system was tone-deaf.

This disconcerting notion is made more probable when we consult another version of the story, as told by the 1^st Century BC historian Ssii-ma Ch'ien:

Starting from the first pipe, the author says, you construct a series of pipes either by "taking away or adding a third" from the pipes that follow. So if the length of the first pipe is 1, the next one is a third shorter, i.e. two-thirds its length, and the following one is a third longer than the previous one, that is 4/3, which will be 8/9 of the first pipe's length. (Ibid. pp. 6-7)

In other words, the tunings determining the lü-lü (literally “pipe-law”) can be constructed purely on the basis of measurement, with no need for any pitch awareness whatsoever. The first five pipes constructed from this method will produce the first five pitches of the “circle of fifths” (e.g., C – G – D – A – E), from which the familiar pentatonic scale can be derived: C-D-E-G-A, or, to use the Chinese terminology: kung, shang, chiao, chih, yü (equivalent to our do, re, me, sol, la).

But there is more. Thanks, possibly, to the aforementioned confusion over the meanings of lü, the Yellow Bell

was conceived simultaneously as a sacred eternal principle, the basis of the state and a note of definite pitch in music. . . It was considered important to find the correct pitch for each dynasty, or political disorder would be likely to ensue. (Peter Crossley-Holland, as quoted in Phillip Tagg, A Short Prehistory of Western Music (rough version 1), p. 15.)

Moreover, possibly because a “law” can also be understood as a “rule,” which can be extended to mean “standard of measurement” (as for example a “ruler”),

The choice of the primary pitch in China had extramusical as well as practical applications, for the length of the yellow bell pipe became the standard measure (like a metre); and the number of grains of rice that would fill it were used for a weight measure. Thus, the pipe itself was often the property not of the Imperial music department but of the office of weights and measurements. (Encyclopedia Britannica website, East Asian Arts.)

And since a “ruler” is not only an implement that measures according to a “rule,” but the one who makes the “rules” (in the sense of “laws”) the Yellow Bell took on central importance in Chinese civilization, putting music “in tune with the universe.”

"Music is the harmony of heaven and earth while rites are the measurement of heaven and earth. Through harmony all things are made known, through measure all things are properly classified. Music comes from heaven, rites are shaped by earthly designs." (Ibid.)

[T]he five fundamental tones are sometimes connected with the five directions or the five elements, while the 12 tones are connected by some writers with the months of the year, hours of the day, or phases of the moon. The 12 tones also can be found placed in two sets of 6 on Imperial panpipes (pai-hsiao) in keeping with the female-male (yin-yang) principle of Chinese metaphysics. (Ibid.)

Origins

There are several things that interest me in this remarkable myth. First, it presents us with a fascinating theory about the origin of the panpipe, an instrument to which I’ve attached considerable importance (see, especially, Chapter Nine), and, by extension, the origins of music itself, one of the principle themes of this book. And not only the origins of music in general, but the origin of the musical notes, and the system by which they are tuned.

Significantly, it associates pipes and/or panpipes with birds (see Chapter Twelve). This is something one finds very often in the literature on panpipes, from many different regions all over the world. And indeed some of the oldest pipes described in the archaeological literature were made from bird bones.

Especially significant are the references to pipes as either male or female. Indeed the story of the Yellow Bell appears to be the source of the fundamental Chinese concept of Yin and Yang. In a great many pipe, flute and panpipe traditions, almost everywhere these instruments are found, from Africa to China, southeast Asia, Melanesia and even the Americas, the division into male and female is important.

And since the story of the Yellow Bell centers on ratios, then perhaps we can think of it also as the story of the origin of mathematics. In fact there are some remarkable similarities between the theory behind the Chinese tuning system and the Pythagorean system of the ancient Greeks. But aren’t all panpipes based on mathematical ratios? In the words of sociologist Marcell Mauss, “a theory of music exists everywhere there are panpipes” (as quoted in Hugo Zemp, "Aspects of 'Are'are Musical Theory" (Ethnomusicology vol. 23, no. 1, 1979)).

Another thing I've noticed in the Chinese accounts is that they are not only about origins but also traditions, and the way traditions are maintained. The Yellow Bell becomes the standard for a great many things that were vital to traditional Chinese society. It began, however, as a wooden pipe and, as such, would tend to expand or contract over time. It was necessary, therefore, for the original process of its creation to be repeated at various times – traditionally at the accession of a new emperor.

One could see this custom as an insight into the nature of tradition, too often misunderstood as the rather boring insistence on continually doing things the same old way. However, as the myth of the Yellow Bell suggests, in order for traditions to continue functioning as such, they must not only be maintained, but renewed (see Sidebar One).

And speaking of origins, my favorite part of this story has to do with the possibility that the whole thing could have begun with a complete misunderstanding. I could be way off base here, and if I'm wrong I hope someone with a knowledge of ancient Chinese will step in to correct me. But if our hero Ling Lun actually was tone deaf, and as a result, actually did misunderstand an order to produce a system of "laws" as an order to produce an arrangement of "pipes," then this too could give us an insight into the meaning of many other venerable and venerated, but also rather strange and inexplicable traditions, which might well have originated in misunderstandings, deceptions, accidents, or other events of a more or less trivial nature.

A Myth is a Lie . . .

I will now proceed to weave a myth of my own, compounded from the Yellow Bell myth interwoven with some of the various yarns I’ve been spinning throughout the course of this book. Before I continue, however, I want to quote one of my all time favorite sayings, attributed to one of my all time favorite artists, Pablo Picasso: “Art is a lie that makes you see the truth.” That for me is a truly profound observation, with enormous resonance in all possible directions. I think the same can be said for myth -- so I'll say it: A myth is a lie that makes you see the truth.

In that spirit, I'll ask some questions that I, for one, find especially intriguing about this particular myth: who was the Yellow Emperor? where did he live? when did he live? what was the Yellow Bell? where was it first created? when was it first created? The assumption behind literally all interpretations of this story is that it takes place at some indefinitely defined "olden time," possibly 2 or 3 hundred, or two or three thousand, years BC, somewhere in China.

To better evaluate that assumption, let's examine a more recent myth about the origin of panpipes, from the United States:

A story handed down by ex-slaves claims that one evening a slave was feeling low in spirit and heard a plaintive cry of a night bird. The sound inspired the slave to get a piece of cane from a canebrake and cut some holes in it. He then commenced to play a “blues” on his whistle. As time went by, the instrument evolved into a set of “quills.” (The Birds and the Blues, by Max Haymes.)

According to this myth, the panpipe, or as it was sometimes called by African-American bluesmen, the "quills," originated in the United States. We know that can't be true, however, because of overwhelming evidence that this instrument antedates the founding of the United States and, indeed, the discovery of the Americas. So the person inspired by the bird could not have been an African-American slave, as the story implies, but someone who lived at a time far more remote than either slavery or America itself.

I believe the same critical thought process must be applied to the myth of the Yellow Emperor and the Yellow Bell. If we are to seek the truth pointed to by the myth, we must both take it seriously and treat it skeptically, tease out the "lie" behind it so we can see the truth toward which it is pointing.

All the evidence tells us the Yellow Emperor could not have been Chinese and the Yellow Bell could not have originated in China.

True Lies

According to musicologist Fritz Kuttner, the original set of wooden pipes could not have consisted of more than five. The complete set of 12 tones mentioned in the version I cited above seem to have been a much later development. Based on his systematic analysis of the terminology associated with each of the 12 tones, Kuttner concludes that the original set of five pipes could only have been produced prior to the era when tuned bells were being cast. And "Since tuned bells dating from the early Shang II period have been found in quantity, the first partial Lü system [i.e., the original five tone scale] might easily go back to Shang I times."

So far this sounds like pretty ordinary, academic stuff, but Kuttner finds his conclusion "almost shocking, because it pushes the beginnings of the traditional Chinese tone system back into pre-historic times in the direction of the legendary dynastic dates which every serious student of China's history would dismiss as naive. It seems that here we have a musicological tiger by the tail because our conclusion must be unacceptable to orthodox sinology.” (“A Musicological Interpretation of the Twelve Lüs in China's Traditional Tone System,” in Ethnomusicology, Vol. 9, No. 1. (Jan., 1965), pp. 22-38.)

Since I'll be weaving a myth of my own, it won't be necessary to examine Kuttner's reasoning too carefully. Even if it contains a flaw, it nevertheless expresses, as I see it, the simple truth hidden behind an elaborate facade. Because pipes and panpipes are found in many different parts of the world, often among indigenous peoples living in remote areas far from any possible Chinese influence.

In fact, as we learned in Chapter Seven, the distribution of these instruments can best be explained on the basis of a common cultural ancestry, dating from a period well before the origin of any of the Chinese dynasties; dating, in all likelihood to the “Out of Africa” migration itself, anywhere from 60,000 to 90,000 years ago. Assuming this musical tradition did in fact have a beginning, which would be pretty difficult to deny, it was certainly not in China.

According to my myth, the “Yellow Emporer” would have been African, possibly an early ancestor of the Bushmen, who are often described as having yellowish complexions (to go with the epicanthic folds in their eyelids). In certain documents he's described as the ancestor of all the Chinese people, but since in my version he's African, maybe he was everyone's ancestor, the first culturally "modern" human. His assistant, the creator of the Yellow Bell, must also have been African -- though he might not have even been a single person, but possibly a group, all working and thinking together. He might not even have been a he, but a she.

Sinologists will no doubt protest, as Kuttner anticipated they would. But on what grounds? If the Yellow Emperor and the Yellow Bell both date back to some mythical, undocumented, past, then who's to say where -- or when -- they originated? And if anyone wants to claim the originator of the myth clearly intended it to be about China and nowhere else, then we're back where we started, with more speculation about origins -- this time the origin of the myth itself. And who's to say where that got started -- and by whom? As I see it, therefore, my version is at least as good as anyone else's. Better in fact, because, as should be clear from everything you’ve read up to now, it is backed up by evidence.

Sets of pipes are, indeed, an important part of the history of Chinese music, Chinese music theory and even Chinese philosophy. They go back a long way into Chinese pre-history, to at least 1100 BC, the estimated date of a set of bird bone instruments found in a tomb in Henan Province. But as the genetic evidence so strongly suggests, the Chinese themselves did not originate in China, but, ultimately, along with everyone else: Africa.

And, as we work our way backward in time from the earliest migration to East Asia by "modern" humans, I see no reason to assume such pipes could have been “independently invented” in that region, especially since they are now so common, not only in Africa, but so many other places along the original migration path, complete with bird associations, male-female pairing, hocketed ensemble performance, and in so many (though not all) cases, pentatonic tunings. Thus, according to my myth, the Yellow Bell was an African instrument, and the first tuned pipes an African invention.

But why, you ask, is this matter so important? Because, as I see it, the myth of the Yellow Bell is not only about the creation of a set of tuned pipes, but the first tonal system, thus the origin of music itself – and not only music, but also language; and not only language, but . . .

The Centrality of Pitch

In almost all speculations regarding early music and its origins, the most essential element, the use of discrete pitches, and their organization into a coherent tonal system, is either ignored or taken for granted – i.e., assumed a priori with no need to explain how it evolved. Yet if there is any one element of music that clearly distinguishes it from any other type of activity, by any other creature, it is pitch.

In the previous chapter, I discussed the manner in which certain apes and gibbons perform coordinated “duets” and/or “choruses,” which, as I speculated, could represent a “missing link” between the hooted vocalizations of primates, which do not employ discrete pitches, and the yodeled vocalizations so commonly found among Pygmies and Bushmen, which do. While duetting and chorusing are, indeed, very close to “Shouted Hocket,” as widely performed among many indigenous peoples worldwide, neither hooting nor shouting, no matter how highly coordinated, can, strictly speaking, be regarded as music. To clarify, let’s compare an example of shouted hocket with a similarly interactive performance characterized by yodeling. (See Chapter Sixteen for references.)

Shouted hocket: an “esime,” or “interlude” between songs, as performed by a group of Aka Pygmies: Audio Example 56: Aka esime

Yodeled hocket: performed by a group of Huli tribesmen, from highland New Guinea: Audio Example 54: Huli Yodeling

In the first example, I hear only unpitched shouting, while in the second I hear two distinct pitches: A# and F#. And the question is: how did we bridge the gap between the first type of vocalization and the second? And why should the difference matter? Before we can meaningfully speculate on such matters, we need to ask ourselves a more basic question: what is a musical tone?

Phonemes and Tonemes

What might seem on the surface to be a simple step, from ordinary vocalizing (as in hoots or shouts) to the singing (or playing) of discrete pitches, is in fact an enormous leap, with profound consequences for human culture and history. What we have been conditioned to hear when we sing, or play an instrument, is very different from the purely acoustical phenomena produced, as displayed on an oscilloscope or sonogram.

For one thing, the “tones” of music are not individual tones at all, but complexes of sound, with many elements, beginning with a set of overtones, combined with certain resonances, instabilities, possibly some degree of nasality, harshness, breathiness, raspiness, etc. What we think we perceive, is, in other words, very much a social construct rather than a given. This is a situation closely analogous with what happens when we hear a spoken syllable, which, for linguists, can be understood either phonetically or phonemically.

The phonetic is what we actually hear acoustically, much of which usually escapes our conscious awareness. The phonemic refers to what we hear psychologically, based on certain fundamental sets of culturally determined oppositions, or "articulations," put into play by each individual language.

More generally, anthropologists often use the term emic (derived from “phonemic”) with reference to the culturally determined aspect of any behavior or belief, and etic (derived from “phonetic”) with reference to descriptions of a more objective nature.

There is no generally accepted equivalent terminology for music but there ought to be, because there is a strong analogy at work between what happens when we perceive musical notes as "tonemes" (to use the relatively obscure, but apt, expression coined by musicologist Charles Seeger) and when we perceive spoken vocables as "phonemes." This is not a coincidence, but an important clue to the nature of both music and language -- and the relation of one to the other.

Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of “structural linguistics” and semiology, argued convincingly that language must be understood as “a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (de Saussure 1922:159). The deep relevance of this statement to the realm of music as well has often been overlooked. The key term is “value”—as in the tonal and rhythmic “values” of Western notation. The values of which de Saussure writes can thus be applied not only to the structure of phonemes (understood as classes of vocables) but to musical notes as well, understood “tonemically” as pitch classes, both of which are produced from field-like systems of class “identity” built on culturally sanctioned (“emic”) distinctions.

“In Olden Times”

How does this relate to the Yellow Bell? Let’s recall the myth: “In olden times,” Ling Lun “selected bamboo grown in the Chieh Ch'i valley. He chose only a piece which was hollow and of even thickness.” But that was only the first step. He then proceeded to construct a set of pipes by adding or subtracting a third of the original’s length, thus producing a system through which the pitches of all tones are related to one another according to simple ratios defined by the smallest whole numbers, specifically the powers of 2 and 3.

In other words, he starts with a pipe that produces a discretely defined pitch, but that is not enough. In order for the pitch to be heard meaningfully, it must be part of “a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (see above). In other words, in order to be heard culturally, as a musical “phoneme,” rather than simply acoustically, as either “pure sound” or “noise,” it is necessary for an individual pitch to be part of a rational tonal system. Thus, a culturally determined system of tuned pipes is already the basis for what can only be called a “language,” musical or otherwise, precisely in the sense defined by Saussure.

There’s more: once you have a situation where different “tonemes” are produced by different pipes in a rationally related set, then, as with the phonemes of spoken language, each pipe has the potential to become a signifier – if for nothing else then, at the very least, the tone it will produce when played. Thus, to “notate” a melody you could line the pipes up in order of size and then point to one pipe at a time, in the same sequence as the notes of the melody you have in mind.¹ It is then only one small step to the understanding of each tone as a signifier for anything one might want to point to while playing or singing. Which puts us well on the road to a language or, if you prefer, proto-language, consisting exclusively of tonal relationships -- consistent, perhaps, with what Steven Brown has called “musilanguage” (The Musilanguage Model of Musical Evolution, in Wallin, Merker & Brown, eds., The Origins of Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 271-300), in which

the many structural features shared between music and language are the result of their emergence from a joint evolutionary precursor rather than from fortuitous parallelism or from one function begetting the other. (p. 271)

Bridging the Gaps

We are now better prepared to return to the question posed above: how did we bridge the gap between simple primate vocalizations and the singing (or playing) of systematically organized musical pitches? To which we will now want to add a second question: given a system of meaningfully organized pitches, or what we might want to call, in Brown’s terms, a “musilanguage,” how did we arrive at both music and language as we now know them?

There is probably no way to answer such questions definitively, as there is far too much information we don’t have, and will in all likelihood, never have. But I do think we are now, after so many preliminaries, in a good position to speculate intelligently on such matters, and in that spirit I will offer the following sequence as a hypothesis worth considering:

1. Interactive "hooted" vocalizations of early primates and pre-humans, along the lines of the "duetting" and "chorusing" of certain contemporary ape and gibbon populations. The adaptational advantage of such behavior was most likely the facilitation of both long distance communication and close cooperation.

2. The morphing of pre-human "hooting" into more or less discretely pitched yodeling could have been an adaptation associated with the transition from a largely vegetarian to a largely carnivorous diet. Since many birds sing using roughly discrete pitches, there would have been an advantage for human hunters in learning how to imitate bird songs as a lure, and yodeling, closely related to hooting, may have been the simplest means of doing that.

3. At some point someone would have discovered that one could do an excellent bird call imitation by blowing into a hollow pipe. Since some of the oldest pipes found in archaeological digs are made from bird bones, this might also have involved a form of imitative magic.

4. There is no way of knowing which of the two previous steps would have come first. Perhaps yodeling and piping developed in tandem, as suggested by the following examples of vocal-instrumental hocket (as first presented in Chapter Nine): Audio Example 19: Voice with Hindewhu, BaBenzele Pygmies; Audio Example 20: Hocket with Voice and Pipe, Huli people, highland New Guinea.

5. More or less isolated pitches produced by either yodels or pipes may have made useful lures, but would still have been a far cry from what we now consider music. They would, no doubt, have been heard simply in terms of how far or close they came to the call of a particular bird. Thus, in order for music to come into existence, there must, at a certain very specific point in human history, have come an extraordinary moment of discovery, every bit as important, in my view, as the invention of the wheel. This is the moment described in the myth of the Yellow Bell, the moment when someone selects a length of cane to make a pipe in the usual way, but then gets the idea of creating a set of pipes, organized according to a system.

It’s important to understand that only through the creation of a set of systematically organized, tangible artifacts could truly musical “tonemes,” as opposed to animal imitations or simple utterances, have come into existence. Regardless of its purely acoustic status, a single tone can never be a toneme. Nor would a set of vocalized pitches have had, at such an early stage, the stability to establish a system of interrelated values, as understood by de Saussure, over time. And since, as we know, almost every human society in the world sings and plays using tonal systems based on ratios very close to the integer ratios associated with the Yellow Bell story, the founding set of pipes would have to have been organized according to more or less the same simple ratios.

6. On the basis of the above sequence, it's not difficult to see how the development of a system of rationally related pitch “classes” or “tonemes” could have led to the development of a language of sorts, based exclusively on tonal relations. Once such a system of tuned pipes is established, we already have, as I argued above, both a “phonemic” and a “semantic” system as well. Each individual tone will now be heard "tonemically," in terms of the tonal structure embodied in the entire set, and will at the same time be in a position to function as a signifier of, at the very least, the note it produces. Could this have been how speech emerged, as a language of pure tones?

7. If the earliest "language" consisted essentially of discrete pitches, then we can see how, for early humans, the development of musical awareness, as part and parcel of linguistic awareness, would have had a powerful adaptational advantage (now lost, of course, since music no longer has the same function).

8. At a certain point this proto-language or “musilanguage” would have diverged into two independent branches -- one leading directly to purely musical interactions something like these: Audio Example 13:Mbuti Pipers (African Pygmies); Audio Example 21: Ede Panpipes (Vietnamese “Montagnards”) (see Chapter Nine for references); Audio Example 84: Chek I Vendelar (the Ouldeme of Cameroon, in Flutes of the Mandara Mountains); Audio Example 85: Kiloloky (the Mikea of Madagascar, from Pays Mikea, Ocora Records); Audio Example 63: Panpipes of Buma (the Buma people, of the Solomon Islands, from Spirit of Melanesia) -- the other leading directly to the development of tone language, as the use of tonal phonemes would have persisted even after non-tonal elements were added. As Steven Brown reminds us, the close association between the two realms can still be heard in the drum and whistle languages of today.²

In sum, the events alluded to in the Yellow Bell myth go well beyond the spatial and temporal borders of ancient China to a foundational moment in “deep history,” a crucial first step in a refining process destined to take us from the raw acoustics of the etic to the first stages of an emic awareness that would ultimately give rise not only to music and language, but so many other aspects of culture, from religion, social organization, kinship, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy etc. to the science and technology of our modern world.

1. One could object that true music notation is permanent, whereas the process I just described is ephemeral and requires memorization. That would be true for the notation of a melody, yes. But each set of pipes can also be regarded as the notation of both a scale and a tuning system. And as such it would have some permanence, at least as much as an inscription on parchment or paper. Moreover, if the original pipes are then used as templates for the production of new pipes, we have a very durable system indeed. As with the digital encoding systems of today, what is “handed down” is not only an original “artifact,” but the process through which the artifact can be continually reconstructed -- and the tradition embodied by it renewed.

2. There is, of course, a great deal more to be said about such possibilities. While I’m not at all sure Dr. Brown would agree with everything (or anything) I’ve written here, I would recommend his essay as a thorough treatment of some of the more subtle and complex aspects of the “musilanguage” hypothesis.

Chapter Sixteen: Missing Links

2011-04-16T15:04:00.012-04:00

In Chapter Four, I described my “baseline” (HBC) as a kind of observatory from which all subsequent societies could be viewed; and in the following chapters I demonstrated how it could be put to use for that purpose. In this chapter, I'll swing the “telescope” around by 180 degrees for a peek in the opposite direction. Instead of looking forward toward what, for our ancestors, would have been the future, I’ll be looking backward toward their past.

It’s important to remember that our Most Recent Common Ancestors (MRCA) were not all that special in themselves, but simply, and due largely to chance, the group from which the ancestors of today’s Pygmies and Bushmen diverged, roughly 60,000 to possibly well over 100,000 years ago. From this very broad perspective, it should be clear that the ancestral culture I’ve been treating as originary is itself the product of historical and evolutionary forces that preceded it, leading all the way back to the first “modern” humans, the earliest archaic humans, and beyond, to the ancestors we have in common with our closest primate relatives.

Is there any evidence that might link the already advanced culture of HBC with that of these much earlier, and decidedly more primitive, societies? Would it surprise you if I answered “yes”? At this point, I suppose not. And would it surprise you if I were to once again claim that the most promising evidence lies within the realm of music? I could be wrong, but as I see it the musical evidence contains some tantalizing clues that I can’t resist exploring.

Out on a Limb

What sort of music might have existed before the already highly developed musical language I’ve posited for our most recent common ancestors? In other words, what could have happened in the many thousands, indeed millions, of years leading up to the development of P/B? Since this style is already so complex and sophisticated, it’s difficult to imagine how it could have been created out of whole cloth. Something much simpler must have preceded it. And here I’ll be literally going out on a limb, to consider the vocal behavior of our cousins, the apes.

In the fascinating book, The Origins of Music, neuroscientist Björn Merker specifically relates the vocalizations of certain primates to the early development of human music:

Synchronous calling . . ., that is, true cooperative synchronous calling rather than synchrony as a default condition of competitive signaling, requires a motivational mechanism for mutual entrainment. We assume that such a mechanism was selected for in the course of hominid divergence from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee, and was retained to the present day in the form of our propensity to join in and entrain to a repetitive beat. . . Indeed, if the present argument should turn out to have any merit, this adaptation for entrainment supplies an irreducible biological root of human music.

While, according to Merker, true synchrony is absent among chimpanzees, it can apparently be found in bonobos. Referring to a study of bonobo vocalizations by the noted primatologist, Franz de Waal, Merker points to “a loud and explosive sound called staccato hooting.” According to de Waal, “during choruses, staccato hooting of different individuals is almost perfectly synchronized so that one individual acts as the ‘echo’ of another, or emits calls at the same moments as another. The calls are given in a steady rhythm of about two per second.” (from Björn Merker, “Synchronous Chorusing and Human Origins,” in Wallin, Merker & Brown, The Origins of Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 318-319).¹

Research by Gottfried Hohmann and Barbara Fruth, who studied Bonobos in the wild, in the Lomako Forest of Central Zaire, is consistent with de Waal's observations:

From analyses of simultaneous high- hootings of mature pairs, it became apparent that calls of both apes were given often in more or less perfect alternation, indicating a remarkable degree of behavioral coordination between them. Jordan (1977) and de Waal (1988) mention a high degree of synchronization between vocalizations of different individuals, and the latter author emphasized the gibbon-like nature of long-distance hooting. (Structure and Use of Distance Calls in Wild Bonobos, 1994).

In a fascinating paper by Ellen Dissanayake, entitled If music is the food of love, what about survival and reproductive success?, the author makes much of certain musical features of human mother-infant interactions. Significantly, she points to "interactive behaviors" between mother and child that

take place . . . sequentially, in bouts of 1.5 to 3 seconds, on a time base, so that each partner in the dyad reacts and responds contingently to the other’s signals within one-half second or less, anticipating and participating in an ongoing, changing, cocreated engagement. I propose that the dyadic coordination developed in mother infant interaction is likely a precursor of human music in which individuals mutually coordinate their voices and body movement in temporally and dynamically structured sequences (my emphasis, p. 177).

Since, according to de Waal, a very similar type of interaction, at essentially the same pace (2 per second), is characteristic of bonobos, Dissanayake's observations seem consistent with the notion of a possible link between human and bonobo vocalizations, reflected in the structure of the mother-infant bond.

Synchronous Calling – Some Examples

On Franz de Waal’s website, based on his book, Our Inner Ape, we find an audio clip where the “chorusings” of multiple bonobos and chimpanzees are compared: Audio Example 76:Bonobos and Chimps. In both cases we hear highly interactive calls; and the bonobo interactions do, as predicted, seem somewhat more precisely timed than those of the chimps.

As indicated by de Waal, as referenced above, the “long-distance hooting” of bonobos resembles that of certain gibbons, and fortunately there are some excellent videos of gibbons interacting vocally. Here is a very interesting youtube video featuring a common type of not- so-distant “duetting” between a pair of Siamang Gibbons. Video Example Nine:Siamang Gibbon Calls

Here's another example, also Siamangs: Video Example 10:Siamang Singing.

Shouted Hocket

While not as precisely synchronized as a well rehearsed musical performance, these highly interactive duets are good examples of the “synchronous calling” invoked by Merker and de Waal. In addition to Merker's insightful speculations, what interests me especially about this sort of behavior is its strong resemblance to a highly distinctive form of human vocal interaction I've called “Shouted Hocket.” (Definitions of the term “hocket” can be found in Chapter One and Appendix A. Shouted Hocket is an extreme simplification of essentially the same principle, based on the rapid interlocking and/or interchange of shouted, hooted or yodeled tones.) To better understand the connection, let’s examine a copy of the phylogenetic map presented in Appendix B (click on image to enlarge):

Figure 16.1 Phylogenetic Map of Musical Evolution. For details on how it was constructed and how to interpret it, see Appendix B.

The tree is rooted at the lower left with a musical “haplotype” labeled “X - Primate Duetting/Chorusing.” X is characterized by four markers: Hk for “hocket,” CV for “continuous vocalizing,” It for “iterative” vocalizing, and Ht for “hooting,” a type of vocalization closely related to yodel. Just above and to the right, we find “A1- Shouted Hocket,” a form of “synchronized calling,” very similar to that of bonobos and gibbons, only performed by humans. A1, also characterized by hocket, continuous vocalizing and iteration, is remarkably close to X.

Let’s listen to some audio clips of Shouted Hocket from various parts of the world, keeping in mind the bonobo, chimp and siamang examples we’ve just heard. Before continuing, however, I want to make clear that it is not my intention to equate the music of any of these people with the calls of apes or gibbons. Most of their music is in fact far more complex and sophisticated than the brief excerpts I'm quoting here.

We’ve already heard some examples of simple two part interactions in Chapter Fourteen:

From the Huli people, Southern Highlands of New Guinea: Audio Example 54: Huli Yodeling (from Emap FM – Music from Oceania ).

From the Dani, also a highland New Guinea group: Audio Example 55: Dani (from Emap FM – Music from Oceania).

An “esime” (shouted interlude between more elaborate songs), from the Aka Pygmies of Africa: Audio Example 56: Aka esime (from Musical Anthology of the Aka Pygmies, recorded by Simha Arom).

Here’s a more complex example of Shouted Hocket from Brazil. Audio Example 77:Mehinacu. Listen especially to the closely interactive hocketing at the very end of the clip, reminiscent of the bonobo and chimpanzee chorusing heard in Audio Example 76 (From Saydisc, Disappearing World.)

Here’s an example of beautifully yodeled “duetting” from the Island of Madagascar, where the Mikea hunter/gatherers have traditionally been considered the indigenous inhabitants. Audio Example 78:Mikea (From the Ocora CD, Madagascar, Pays Mikea.)

An especially interesting and intricate hocketed vocal interchange, sometimes called “throat singing” can be found among many Siberian groups, where it is associated with shamanic traditions, and also among the Inuit (Eskimos), where it is currently regarded as a game.

From Kamchatka, in Siberia: Audio Example 79:Kamchatka

From the Inuit: Video Example 11:Eskimo Inuit Throat Singing.

Compare with this shamanic ritual from the Ainu indigenes of Japan: Audio Example 80:Ainu. Something similar, but thousands of miles away, from the Hupa, a native American tribe of Northern California: Audio Example 81:Hupa (from Lee Productions).

Halfway between A1, Shouted Hocket, and A2, Interlocked Hocket, we find more complexly interactive vocalizations, close in some ways to the chorusing of both bonobos and chimps, as heard above, but more precisely synchronized. Listen, for example, to this excerpt from an extended initiation ritual among the Ju’hoansi Bushmen: Audio Example 82:Tcoqma (from Namibia:Chants des Bushmen Ju’hoansi, recorded by Emmanuelle Olivier). To my ears there are some truly remarkable similarities between this African ritual and the now familiar “Monkey Chant” of Bali: Audio Example 83:Ketjak (from Golden Rain, recorded by David Lewiston).

A Musical Link

Can we understand Shouted Hocket (which includes not only unpitched shouting, but also pitched hooted and yodeled “shouts” as well) as a kind of “missing link” between pre-homosapien vocalizing, represented by the duetting and chorusing of bonobos, chimps and gibbons, and our musical "haplogroups," A2, A3, and A4, characterized by more complexly interwoven parts, in counterpoint and/or canon? In other words, was there, at some time deep into the African “Stone Age,” some sort of evolution from something resembling the coordinated vocalizing of today's primates to the far more sophisticated and intricate, but still highly interactive, musical “language” of P/B?

As described by Michelle Kisliuk (see above), the Pygmy “Esime” is a shouted or hooted interlude of the sort often found between more complexly organized interlocked songs. Could it be a survival of an original, unpitched, pre-musical type of vocal interchange? The example we’ve heard from the Dani people of New Guinea combines a very rhythmic shouted interchange with some softer yodeling heard in the background. The Huli example is very similar but this time clearly yodeled and also pitched, alternating tones a major third apart.

The Mehinacu example is shouted, but the Mikea example that follows is both yodeled and pitched. The example of “throat singing” from Kamchatka is clearly pitched, on three different tones, but the Inuit example is all on one note, more closely resembling primate duetting. Note also the audible breathing in these examples, suggesting hyperventilation (see below).

Both the Ainu and Hupa songs involve both singing and shouted hocket, both with heavy breathing and suggestions of hyperventilation as well. Hyperventilation is clearly present in the Bushmen Tcoqma initiation ceremony, where it is associated with shamanism and trance. The Balinese Ketchak, or “Monkey Chant” is most astonishing of all. Though today it is performed largely for tourists, it is thought to have originated in shamanic trance practices that predate Hinduism.

Shamanic Links

The question now is: what can we make of all these examples? Are there other aspects of any or all of these performances that could give us some clue to their meaning, cultural, historical or both? An especially promising clue is provided by the pioneering research of semiologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, as described in a remarkable essay, "Inuit Throat-Games and Siberian Throat Singing: A Comparative, Historical, and Semiological Approach" (Ethnomusicology 43, 3, 1999). Having studied examples of throat singing from certain Siberian tribes, the Ainu of the Sakhalin Peninsula and Hokkiado, and various Inuit groups of Alaska and Northern Canada, Nattiez notes that there is a significant difference in meaning between the various Inuit traditions, understood simply as games, and the traditions of the Siberians and Ainu, where throat singing has strong associations with shamanism.

Understood strictly "in context," one might dismiss the very strong stylistic resemblances among all these different practices as of no importance since one functions merely as a game while the others have a very different function, as part of shamanic rituals. Digging deeper, Nattiez brackets the issue of function to consider more generally applicable explanations for all the many similarities, along three categories: "universalist," "diffusionist," and "phylogenetic." Rejecting the first as unlikely and the second as improbable (because the vast geographic distances all but rule out direct influence), he embraces a phylogenetic interpretation:

Among the Inuit and the people of Asia, analogies of distribution between linguistic features . . ., archaeological artefacts . . . and genetic data . . . have been established. This strongly suggests that these connections are the result of a migration which occurred 4,000 to 5,000 years ago . . . (pp. 411-412)

He concludes that what is true for the linguistic, archaeological and genetic connections is probably true for the musical practices, especially in the light of the long series of stylistic similarities he then enumerates. They must all stem from "common protoforms, as is the case for genes and languages..." (p. 413)

Nattiez goes on to consider

why these symbolic forms do not necessarily have these religious connotations today, particularly among the Canadian Inuit. The semiological distinction between the signifier and the signified in an historical perspective will help us to understand how a similar form (a similar signifier) gets a new meaning (a new signified) in a different culture... From this situation, we may draw broader conclusions of interest for general musicology and semiology. In sonorous symbolic forms, the form, the signifier, best resists transformations through time. However, the signified, the religious significations of the animal and nature imitations associated with these forms, are evanescent. (p. 414)

This conclusion is extraordinary, literally turning on its head the long cherished assumption that the only meanings to be seriously considered are those signified in the context of a particular society, meanings which, for Nattiez, must be considered "evanescent." As his research clearly demonstrates, it is the musical signifier that has the power to persist through the ages, from one social context to the next, thus offering the more reliable index of human history and, potentially, the more convincing and satisfying insight into the meaning of music in the broadest and deepest sense.

While Nattiez explodes the hegemony of the functionalist and contextualist assumptions so dear to so many anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, he clearly could not have arrived at the conclusions he did without a very deep prior investigation into the functions and immediate contexts of throat-singing as manifested in all the different cultures studied. In fact, it was the testimony of an Inuit woman, who recalled some things her grandmother had said about the association of Inuit throat "games" with hunting magic, that provided him with an important clue to the origin of such games in shamanistic practice (p. 405).

Significantly, the Balinese “Monkey Chant” is also thought to have originally been part of a shamanic ritual. The Ju'hoansi Tcoqma is unquestionably shamanic, associated with an all night initiation ceremony for young boys, in which many men go into trance and perform healing rituals. Among the Ju'hoansi, the great majority of males are considered shamans, with potentially very powerful healing powers.

A Circumpolar “Proto-form”

As Nattiez demonstrates, the circumpolar “throat-singing” tradition he's identified can be understood as a unified style family despite its being interpreted differently in different social contexts, as either a shamanic practice or a game. It's important to understand that Nattiez achieves his results phylogenetically, by working his way backward, with the aid of archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence, to a “protoform” for all manifestations of this style, a common root dating to thousands of years in the past. Is it possible for us to connect all or at least some of the other types of “shouted hocket” we've been considering, from Melanesia, Indonesia, South America, Africa, etc., via the same protoform? And if so, would the association with shamanism still be relevant?

As should be clear by now, a significant amount of additional research into both the musical practices and cultural background of all the groups we're considering would be necessary before any solid conclusions could be drawn. Nevertheless, there is a great deal we are in a position to consider at this point, if only provisionally. If all these instances could indeed, in one way or another, turn out to be associated with shamanism, that would certainly strengthen the connection. But as Nattiez has shown, it's not necessary for the social function, the signified, to remain the same, since the same signifier may, over time, come to take on different significations.

What's most important is the ability to trace the various manifestations of the signifier we are examining back to a single source phylogenetically. The presence of shamanism in certain contexts might indeed provide an important clue, but, as Nattiez has taught us, the absence of any particular signified should not necessarily impinge on an investigation of the underlying signifier.

The protoform under consideration here must be understood not simply as a theoretical construct but a real musical style, practiced by real people at a certain time and place, i.e., both historically and geographically. Taking historical linguistics as his guide, Nattiez associates the throat-singing protoform with the time when three language families, Eskimo-Aleut, Chuckchi-Kamchatkan and Altaic were, according to certain linguistic theories, one and the same -- a connection reinforced by evidence from the then nascent field of population genetics. (I'm delighted to note, by the way, that Nattiez has preceded me, not only by taking the genetic evidence into account, but also by suggesting that the musical evidence might actually have a bearing on the way the supposedly “more scientific” linguistic and genetic theories are evaluated.)

Whereas Nattiez was guided by the linguistic and genetic evidence current at that time, pointing to a circumpolar root culture 4,000 or 5,000 years old, we are in a position to take an even broader view, on the basis of the more recently developed, far more extensive, “Out of Africa” theory, with characteristic time spans ranging into the tens of thousands of years. Such research provides us with a “standard candle” based on estimates of anywhere from roughly 60,000 to over 100,000 years for the branching of proto-Pygmies and proto-Bushmen from MRCA. As I've already argued, the extraordinary similarities between the musical traditions of the Pygmies and Bushmen, combined with the genetic results, warrant a complete rethinking of our sense of how long a particular tradition may persist unchanged.

Hyperventilation

There is no reason to assume, therefore, that Nattiez’s protoform is only 4 or 5 thousand years old, simply because the divergence of certain language families might date to that time. If the throat-singing complex is, as I suspect, a variant of the far more widely distributed A1 “haplogroup” I’ve labeled “Shouted Hocket,” the protoform might well be truly archaic, traceable not only to HBC but far beyond, to some of the deepest mysteries of our distant past.

According to Nattiez, a pervasive characteristic of throat-singing is the production of a continual stream of sound through rapid alternations of audible exhaling and inhaling, “which create what can be called a 'panting style' . . . the main feature common to the three cultures under consideration” (p. 401). In a remarkable essay, Can Hyperventilation be a trance mechanism in Nganasan ritual dance accompaniment, Triinu Ojamaa and Jaak Aru demonstrate the relation between “panting style,” hyperventilation and trance in the Nganasan Bear Dance, yet another example of the shamanic circumpolar tradition explored by Nattiez. According to the authors, “Inspiration and expiration alternate in a certain rhythm. We can characterize the accompaniment as rhythmically organized panting.” Their essay presents convincing evidence, both musical and biological, of the relationship between hyperventilation and trance, a pervasive feature of shamanism.

Clear signs of hyperventilation can be found in our examples from Kamchatka, the Inuit, Ainu, Hupa, and Ju'hoansi, while there are strong indications of something similar going on in the uncannily rapid, trance inducing, vocal interlock of the Balinese “Monkey Chant.” There are in fact many other instances in many parts of the world where vocalizing combines shouted hocket with gutteral “panting,” hyperventilation and trance, though not always associated with shamanism per se.

A remarkable variant can be found, for example, among Masai warriors, who chant, according to Malcom Floyd, in “a semi-vocalised, semi-pitched, rhythmic hyperventilation accompaniment technique” called nkuluut, characterized by low pitched, gutteral sounds” (British Forum for Ethnomusicology Newsletter, 2001, vol. 1).

Video Example 12:Masai Warriors in Masai Mara

According to Floyd, this type of performance serves both as a source of arousal and containment of that arousal, in delicate balance. “It will also be noted, however, it is not uncommon for the arousal to reach depths which make containment impossible, for nkuluut to overpower melody, resulting in extreme cases in seizures leading to catatonic states.” While such chanting can be organized according to the call and response litany format so commonly found in Africa, it can also take the form of a type of shouted interlock very close indeed to both Bushmen and Paleosiberian practice.

A bio-cultural link?

As we’ve learned, many non-human primates vocalize in a remarkably similar manner, as exemplified by the so-called “pant-hoots” commonly heard among bonobos, chimps and gibbons, a basis for the duetting and chorusing sequences illustrated above. There is, however, a significant difference. Their continuous, rapid-fire vocalizing is facilitated by large air sacs:

Figure 16.2 Siamang Air Sac

According to a study by Gwen Hewitt, Ann MacLarnon, and Kate E. Jones,

apes and larger gibbons may be able to produce fast extended call sequences without the risk of hyperventilating because they can re-breathe exhaled air from their air sacs. Humans may have lost air sacs during their evolutionary history because they are able to modify their speech breathing patterns and so reduce any tendency to hyperventilate (The Functions of Laryngeal Air Sacs in Primates: A New Hypothesis, the International Journal of Primatology, Vol. 73, No. 2-3, 2002)²
.

Could we postulate, on this basis, a situation in the distant past where a newly speciated band of humans, no longer equipped with air sacs, were nevertheless attempting to vocalize in the “traditional” pant-hooting, duetting and chorusing manner, an effort which would have placed them dangerously near the threshold of hyperventilation, unconsciousness and trance? An essential difference between the vocalizing of their predecessors (X) and their own, newly minted, version (A1) would have been the need to work out some sort of strategy for avoiding or at least delaying hyperventilation and its effects by modifying their breathing patterns, as the article suggests.

Might the very real possibility of falling into trance while vocalizing in this manner provide a clue to the origins of shamanism? And since so much of the culture of indigenous peoples is based on experiences encountered during trance, might we also dare to attribute the origins of culture itself to an instinctive need to vocalize continually despite the loss of air sacs?

1. Merker's interest is primarily in unison synchronization rather than alternation, as in his view it is the former that must have played the greater role in the early development of music. After a brief email exchange in which I explained my views, he was unwilling to accept my position regarding the greater significance of alternation in such chorusing, as a possible precursor of hocket, which for him lacks the significance it has for me.

2. The whole issue of the role of primate air sacs in continuous vocalizing raises all sorts of interesting questions with respect to possibly related issues in musical evolution, such as the role of certain instruments requiring recycling of the breath, such as the didjeridoo, or instruments like the bagpipe, with air sacs built in.

Sidebar 4: Update

2011-04-08T16:43:00.039-04:00

In Chapter One, when comparing African Pygmy and Bushmen populations, I wrote as follows:

Both peoples have long been thought to occupy a much older historical layer, with far deeper roots – though until recently no one had any idea how deep. More significantly, they are based in completely different parts of Africa, within totally different environments, and are thought to have remained isolated throughout most of their history from all other humans – and certainly from one another – for many thousands of years.

However, a newly published paper by Chiara Batini et al., based on a remarkably thorough study of the Y chromosome (male lineage) evidence, calls into question the notion that Pygmies and Bushmen have in fact been completely isolated throughout most of their history (as was previously thought on the basis of the mitochondrial evidence): Signatures of the pre-agricultural peopling processes in sub-Saharan Africa as revealed by the phylogeography of early Y chromosome lineages in Molecular Biology and Evolution, Apr. 4, 2011.

While this paper reinforces the overall genetic picture presented in Chapter Two, affirming that Pygmy and Bushmen genomes occupy the oldest branches of the Y chromosome (male) tree, consistent with the mtDNA (female line) evidence, their research shows "evidence for further complexity in the evolutionary relationships among African hunter-gatherers."

Our extensive phylogeographic and dating approach has provided evidence for relatively recent contact both among Pygmies and between them and San groups from southern Africa. Our current estimates for the coalescent time between Eastern and Western Pygmy specific Y chromosome clades (10-15 Kya) are compatible with post-LGM [last glacial maximum] contact among the two groups, with evidence for recent bottlenecks in the demographic histories of the two groups (see also Patin et al. 2009, Batini et al. 2011). Otherwise, the very recent common ancestry detected among Western Pygmies and San (3-4 Kya) suggests that this could be the signature of Khoe-speaking pastoralist mediated contact among the two groups, rather than resulting from retention of ancient traits. (my emphasis)

This new finding adds a very interesting wrinkle to the genetic evidence, somewhat complicating the picture I've presented in a manner that calls for further analysis and discussion.

Let's take a closer look. In the new paper, Batini et al identify

evolutionary links between western Pygmies and San in both A and B clades [see the Y chromosome tree presented in Chapter Two], developing the initial findings presented in Wood et al. (2005). Hg A2, found among SA [Southern African] Khoisan speakers [i.e., Bushmen] at 25-45% (Wood et al. 2005; Table S9), was detected for the first time in the present work at non trivial frequency (5%) among the Baka Pygmies from Cameroon and Gabon. On the other hand, B2b4 was present at 6-7% among Khoisan speakers but reached 45-67% in both Biaka and Baka Pygmies (Wood et al. 2005; Table S9). (p. 14)

Reading up to this point, my assumption would be that the Bushmen-Pygmy connections most likely date from the time of earliest divergence, estimated at approx. 60 to possibly over 100 thousand years ago. However, "[w]e dated the TMRCA [Time to the Most Recent Common Ancestor] among the western Pygmies and San [Bushmen] specific sub-clades of these two haplogroups to between 3 and 4 Kya." One possible explanation: "the very recent common ancestry detected among Western Pygmies and San (3-4 Kya) suggests that this could be the signature of Khoe-speaking pastoralist mediated contact among the two groups, rather than resulting from retention of ancient traits." (p. 20) The pastoralists referred to are most likely a currently extinct Khoisan speaking group, the so-called "Hottentots," known as herders rather than hunter-gatherers, but nevertheless closely related genetically to Bushmen.

Close Encounters of the First Kind

Is it possible that one or more groups of Hottentot males may have encountered Pygmies in their wanderings over the last few thousand years? And is it also possible that a group of Pygmy males may have wandered out of the forest to encounter a Bushmen encampment? Since the Y chromosome evidence suggests encounters of this kind occurred and since such a possibility seems reasonable, I see no reason to doubt it. The question is: what could such encounters have meant, and what sort of cultural exchanges could have taken place that might account for some (or all?) of the similarities I've rooted in HBC?

To put things in perspective, it’s important to remember that the mtDNA evidence presents a very different picture: “[p]hylogeographic analyses of mtDNA point to an ancient separation among ancestral populations, with limited or no subsequent gene flow after the split” (my emphasis -- Batini et al, p. 20). The “ancient separation” applies not only to Pygmies and Bushmen, but also to Western and Eastern Pygmies, thought to have diverged roughly 20,000 years ago. Since mtDNA reflects female population patterns, this means there is little or no evidence of any significant exchange of females between either Western and Eastern Pygmies or Pygmies and Bushmen, since their initial divergences, deep into the African Stone Age. If so, then we would expect to see typically Pygmy haplotypes intermixed with typically Bushmen haplotypes in the mtDNA evidence, but that is not the case.

While we do find a certain amount of such evidence in the male line, it seems likely that sexual encounters among the three populations were incidental, since only a small percentage of relatively recent “alien” haplotypes (5-7%) is represented in the Y chromosome data for any of them. (We must also remember that there is a significant difference between males and females with respect to reproduction. While the offspring a single female may produce is limited, the number of children potentially sired by a male is, in principle, both unrestricted and unpredictable -- thus Y chromosome evidence is much more difficult to assess than mtDNA.)

It seems unlikely, therefore, that any Bushmen (or Hottentot) group might have actually merged for any significant length of time with a Pygmy group, or vice-versa, at any time since TMRCA (the Time to the Most Recent Common Ancestor). While the Y chromosome evidence suggests that encounters between Pygmy and Bushmen, or Western Pygmy and Eastern Pygmy, males and females may have taken place from time to time, there is no evidence that such encounters were of the sort that would be likely to engender any significant degree of acculturation. Nevertheless, social contact of even the most limited sort might entail cultural influence, and such a possibility cannot be dismissed.

Cultural Diffusion vs. Archaic Survival

I must admit, in this regard, that the new evidence for recent contact somewhat weakens what I had originally considered an “iron-clad” case for P/B as an archaic survival, rooted in the culture of our mutual ancestors (HBC). If, as I had assumed, there were no real possibility of any contact at all between any Pygmy and Bushmen groups subsequent to their ancient divergence, then the likelihood that P/B could have developed in one group only and spread to the others via cultural diffusion was essentially nil. While my argument is no longer quite as iron-clad as before, I must nevertheless insist that cultural diffusion in this particular case remains highly unlikely.

For one thing, we are talking about a highly distinctive tradition shared by many different groups in widely dispersed, relatively isolated pockets of Africa, surrounded by other, very different groups, more powerful and influential, with very different cultures and musical styles. Assuming that one or more Pygmy or Bushmen males from one of these groups had intercourse with females from another, and assuming the females were so impressed with their music that they decided to teach it to their children, it’s nevertheless very difficult to understand how such a practice could thereafter have spread to so many of the other Pygmy and Bushmen groups via similar chance encounters.

Considering that the divide between proto-Pygmies and proto-Bushmen has been estimated at over 65,000 ya and the divide between Eastern and Western Pygmies anywhere from 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, it’s especially difficult to understand how events taking place only 3 or 4 thousand years ago could have led to a distribution of so complex and distinctive a tradition among so many populations that would, by that time, have almost certainly become widely dispersed.

Secondly, we must take into consideration the strong affinities between this particular musical style and the highly integrated social structure/value system so characteristic of so many groups of Pygmies and Bushmen, as discussed in Chapter Three. It’s one thing to assume that a group of males might have taught some songs to a group of females, it’s another to assume that such an encounter could have led an entire society to alter its social structure and value system to conform to the requirements of the musical style embodied in these songs, especially when, as in this case, a particular lifestyle and a particular musical style appear to have developed in tandem, to the point that P/B is a pervasive part of everyday life among both Pygmies and Bushmen, embracing literally everyone in the community.

Reconsidering the Baseline

The situation may not be so clear, however, with respect to other traditions included in the baseline. Beehive huts are almost always constructed by women, so it’s unlikely this tradition could have been transmitted via an encounter with foreign males. Deeply rooted traditions associated with core values are also unlikely to have originated via more or less incidental contacts. More specific practices and artifacts are a different story, however, so it’s difficult to be quite so confident when it comes to things like certain musical instruments, certain tools, practices such as scarification, or even certain practices associated with shamanism, which could conceivably be due to recent outside influences.

In almost all such cases, however, it’s still very difficult to explain how any of them could have diffused so widely over such a large area and among so many relatively isolated groups. The “triangulation” method I used in constructing the baseline encompasses three populations living in three widely separated regions, who, according to both the mtDNA and Y chromosome evidence, diverged from a common ancestral population many thousands of years ago. It’s difficult to see how any cultural commonalities among so many of these groups could be the result of relatively recent, relatively incidental, contacts.

Of all the cultural elements listed in the baseline, the bow and arrow is the most open to questions of this sort. It’s conceivable that this technology, always associated with males, may have been invented at a later time, and diffused among the various Pygmy and Bushmen groups via a relatively recent encounter of the sort implied by the Batini paper. In this case, the tradition could have been spread throughout Africa generally as part of the Bantu expansion, of ca. 3 to 4 thousand years ago. As I see it, much depends on the associated use of poison tips, which, since found among so many Pygmy and Bushmen groups, does appear to have originated with HBC (though more research on the distribution of this practice is needed). It’s possible, of course, that an earlier tradition of poison tipped spears may have been transmitted to arrow points at a much later date, so the issue remains very much up in the air.

Batini et al have raised some interesting questions with regard to the consequences of relatively recent contacts among hunter-gatherers, which may or may not have a bearing on certain issues raised in this book. Reluctant as I am to invoke an old saw, more research is definitely needed before the meaning of this evidence can be more fully assessed.

Chapter Fifteen: Upcoast, Downcoast -- from Asia to the Americas

2011-03-23T16:47:00.009-04:00

According to most anthropologists, humans first entered the Americas via a land bridge linking northeast Asia with Alaska. Certain dissenters have nevertheless pointed to evidence suggesting more direct trans-Pacific links. Among the most notable was Paul Rivet, founder of the Musée de l'Homme, who argued that “the dark skinned people of New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, and Fiji, as well as the inhabitants of the Polynesian archipelagos—Maoris, crossed the Pacific Ocean in their canoes, and arrived in Central and South America, from where their descendants spread all across the Americas” (Paul Rivet, New World Encyclopedia Online).

Rivet’s theory was based on physical similarities, such as bone structure and blood type; similar traditions, such as head hunting; and certain linguistic parallels. Other investigators, such as Joseph Needham, have noted striking cultural similarities suggesting an ancient Chinese influence on groups such as the Northwest Coast Indians and the high cultures of Central and South America. Over the years a considerable body of evidence for trans-Pacific contacts of various kinds has accumulated, but the topic remains controversial in the extreme.¹

Musical Cognates

An especially compelling argument for trans-Pacific migrations could be made on the basis of musical evidence alone. Various wind ensembles involving pipes, panpipes, flutes, whistles, horns and trumpets abound not only in Africa, Southeast Asia and Melanesia, as we have learned, but also Central and South America. Ensembles of this sort are not found north of the Rio Grande, suggesting that carriers of these traditions may have arrived via the south Pacific.

Cross cultural comparisons by some of the early pioneers of ethnomusicology tended to support the trans-Pacific model. In a review of Erich von Hornbostel’s 1911 paper “Über ein akustisches Kriterium für Kulturzusammenhänge” (“On an acoustic criterion for cultural association”), no less an authority than Edward Sapir expresses his conviction in no uncertain terms. For Sapir, Hornbostel’s comparative study of Melanesian and Brazilian panpipe tunings proved that

the pan-pipes of Melanesia and South America are historically connected, not merely because they are pan-pipes but because their detailed musical construction is too closely alike to be explained by convergent evolution. Here at last we have clear evidence of a cultural contact between these two parts of the world (Collected Works of Edward Sapir, de Gruyter, 1994 (1913), p. 158).

Since musicologists of that era were fixated on tuning systems and scales, they paid little attention to either the manner in which the instruments are performed or how they sound when played together. If they had, the trans-Pacific associations would have been even more convincing. In almost all cases, from Africa to Melanesia to the Americas, the music played by such instruments is divided into at least two hocketing/interlocking parts. In the case of pipes, whistles, trumpets and horns, each instrument is capable of producing only one or two notes, but even in panpipe or flute ensembles all instruments perform in closely interactive hocketed interlock.

Unlike Western counterpoint, but very similar to certain practices found in Africa, what we hear is not the intertwining of independent lines, but a resultant melodic/ polyphonic texture produced by the juxtaposition of interlocking parts. In almost all cases, from both Melanesia and the Americas, the instruments are symbolically divided into two complementary groups, one male, the other female.

To get a visceral sense of how closely some of these very widespread practices resemble one another, let’s hear some examples from both sides of the ocean:

Hocketing bark horns of the Aitape, northern coast of New Guinea: Audio Example 61: Pig Hunting Song

Hocketing bark horns of the Piaroa Indians of the Upper Orinoco, Venezuela: Audio Example 62: Piaroa Horns (from The Columbia Library of World Music, Venezuela, recorded by Pierre Gaisseau).

Panpipes of the the Buma people, on the island of Malaita, in the Solomons: Audio Example 63: Panpipes of Buma (from Spirit of Melanesia).

Compare the above with this closely interlocking pipe duet of the Cuna Indians, from Panama (as already presented in Chapter Nine): Audio Example 23:Cuna Pipes (Primitive Music of the World, Folkways).

Curiously Andean-sounding panpipes of the Are’are people of the Solomon Islands (as already presented in Chapter Nine): Audio Example 22:Are’are pipers (from Solomon Islands:The Sound of Bamboo, recorded by Buaoka & Sekine).

Compare with these Andean panpipes, from Bolivia: Audio Example 64: Kacharpaya Kantu (from Bolivia-Panpipes – UNESCO, track 4).

Hocketing flute duet, Sepik Region, New Guinea: Audio Example 65: Sepik Flutes (from Spirit of Melanesia).

Hocketing flute duet, Iawa Indians, upper Amazon Basin, Peru: Audio Example 66: The Mayantu (from Music of the Upper Amazon, Lyrichord LL157, recorded by Bertrand Flornoy).

Compare the above with this duet from the Madang region of northern New Guinea: Audio Example 67: Nubia-Sissimungum (from Windim Mambu:Sacred Flute Music from New Guinea, vol. 2, track 5, recorded by Ragnar Johnson).

Here’s a somewhat different sounding flute duet, featuring repeated tones, also from Madang: Audio Example 68: Gomkail Flutes (from Windim Mambu:Sacred Flute Music from New Guinea, vol. 2, track 1).

Compare with the repeated tones in this flute duet, from the Camayura of the Amazon basin, Brazil: Audio Example 69: Camayura Sacred Flutes (from Anthology of Central and South American Indian Music, Smithsonian Folkways 4542).

In both New Guinea and South America, such flutes are played in pairs, with the larger considered “male” and the smaller “female.” According to Ragnar Johnson, who recorded the Madang flutes, “each player blows in turn; one flute is blown and the other alternates. It requires all the air in a man’s lungs to blow a flute, so one player inhales while the other is blowing his flute.” The Madang flutes “are made, owned, played and kept secret by adult men.

Women and children are forbidden to see the flutes and are told that the cries of the flutes are the voices of actual spirits.” (Sacred Flute Music from New Guinea, 1999, accompanying pamphlet, p. 1) Essentially the same taboo applies in South America as well -- paralleled by very similar restrictions regarding the Mbuti Pygmy molimo trumpet, also considered a spirit voice and also forbidden to women and children (Turnbull 1961:82).

Remarkably close similarities can be found among percussion ensembles as well, since very similar types of slit drums and stamping tubes are found abundantly in both Southeast Asia/Melanesia and South/Central America.

Canonic/Echoic Style

The musical “cognates” are not limited to instrumental music. Many groups in both regions sing together in roughly coordinated canons or rounds, a highly distinctive style I’ve referred to as “Canonic/Echoic” (“haplogroup” B1 in the Phylogenetic Tree presented in Appendix B). This style, based on the interlocked imitation of similar motives to produce a kind of “echo” effect sounds to me like a variant of certain types of Pygmy/Bushmen canonic interlock (“haplogroup” A4), the principal difference being that the latter is rhythmically precise and tightly coordinated while the former tends to be rhythmically imprecise and uncoordinated.

Since both styles are based on essentially the same musical principle, the temporal displacement of a single motive or melody among two or more singers, “Canonic/Echoic” style (C/E) could be a development from P/B, as suggested by the Phylogenetic Tree – and in that sense we could say that it too, like the instrumental styles discussed above, carries the “African Signature.” On the other hand, I am not aware of any examples of C/E anywhere in Africa, suggesting a post-bottleneck origin.

Let’s first listen to the sort of thing that might have served as its prototype, a three part Mbuti Pygmy “canon” in classic P/B style: Audio Example 70: Amabele-o-iye (from On the Edge of the Ituri Forest, recorded by Hugh Tracey, track 16).

The following imitative duet, from the Kaluli people of Bosavi, in the New Guinea highlands, is quite similar, but loosely coordinated rhythmically, as is characteristic of C/E: Audio Example 71: Ulahi and Eyobo sing at a waterfall (from Bosavi: Rainforest Music From Papua New Guinea, Smithsonian Folkways, recorded by Steven Feld). According to Steven Feld, the Kaluli refer to this type of singing as “lift-up-over sounding.”

Compare with this similarly ragged “canon” from an Iawa Indian ceremony, in Peru: Audio Example 72: The Kaputio (from Music of the Upper Amazon, Lyrichord LL157, recorded by Bertrand Flornoy).

Here’s a very similar duet, a lullaby from the ‘Are’are of the Solomon Islands: Audio Example 73: Lullabye (from The Solomon Islands:Sounds of Bamboo, track 36).

Finally, let’s listen to one more example of C/E, from Venezuela, a trio of Warao shamans, loosely echoing one another: Audio Example 74: Hoarotu Shamans (recording by Dale Olson, accompanying the book, Music of Many Cultures, Elizabeith May, Ed.).

A Distinctive “Style-Trace”

In a little-known but extremely important Cantometric study of Amerindian song style, Alan Lomax’s anthropological collaborator, Edwin Erickson, identifies a substyle corresponding quite closely with that illustrated above, which he designates “Specialized South America-Mexico.” On the basis of strictly statistical, computer-based research (Erickson was an anthropologist, not a musicologist), he describes it as follows:

The bounding of the style domain, the distribution of its diagnostic traits and the patterning of resemblances all suggest that the underlying style trace has isolated a very old and generalized diffusion sphere . . .

If the appearance of these distinctive traits, especially in multiples, were the result, for example, of independent invention, or elaboration of old and broadcast American Indian styles, there would be no reason to expect the sharp bounding of the distribution area. (The Song Trace: Song Styles and the Ethnohistory of Aboriginal America. Ph. D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1969-70, p. 301.)

After considerable discussion of various anthropological and archaeological ramifications of this style, he speculates regarding a possible association with the panpipe:

The distribution [of panpipes] in South America, thus, goes beyond the compass of the specialized South American style domain, but not very far beyond. . . Clearly, pair-playing of panpipes is a powerful sorting device for specialized South American style (pp. 329, 331).

The Homogeneous North

The musical picture presented so far is completely different from that of North America, or to be more precise, America north of Mexico, where there are basically three instrument types, the drum, the rattle and the flute, and a remarkably homogenous vocal style, characteristic of the great majority of native North American tribal groups, regardless of language, subsistence type, environment, etc.

[Added 3-25-11: Exceptions can be found among the tribal groups of the Northwest Coast, where we find a wider variety of musical instruments than is typical for North America, and also certain groups in California, notably the Hupa, who employ a form of shouted hocket resembling certain types of Ainu vocalizing. Panpipes made from metal or ceramic materials have been unearthed by archaeologists in so-called “Mound Builder” sites, dating roughly from 3,000 to 1,000 years ago. There is strong evidence that these instruments, along with many other artifacts and customs, such as head flattening, ear plugs, the use of mica, etc., even the practice of mound building itself, could have originated in Mexico, specifically the La Venta culture of Veracruz (see Silverberg 1968:222-27).]

At least six principal sub-families have been identified for this region: Northwest Coast-Eskimo; California-Yuman; Great Basin; Athabascan; Plains-Pueblo; Eastern Woodlands (Nettl 1965:157-162). Songs from each such family can often be distinguished from the others by certain specific traits, such as the wide-ranging “terraced” melodies of the Plains and Pueblos, the melodic rise characteristic of the California-Yuman family, or the call and response patterns typical of the Eastern Woodlands.

Especially interesting is the manner in which characteristic “nonsense” vocables are deployed in almost all of these traditions, so that, for example, a Navajo song almost always ends with the syllables “he-ney-yan-ga,” while “he-ya-ha-ya” is more characteristic of Plains songs. The music of each “family,” and in many cases each tribe, can often be identified on the basis of its favored nonsense vocables alone. To my knowledge, this is a situation unparalleled in any other musical region of the world.

While each North American “family” has its own idiosyncrasies, the differences appear minor compared to the many commonalities that make this region, along with Australia, among the most musically homogeneous in the world. The most prominent shared characteristics would appear to be: unison singing; relatively straightforward percussion accompaniment on drums and/or rattles, usually based on a simple one-beat pattern; a preponderance of “nonsense” vocables; wide intervals; moderately tense voices; and an idiosyncratic manner of forming melodies, where most notes are squarely on the beat and the iteration of the same pitch over different vocables is common, especially at phrase endings.

Variants of more or less the same style can be found among many Central and South American Indian tribes as well. But such qualities tend to be rare among the groups identified above, i.e., those with the strongest trans-Pacific links – which also happen to be those bearing the “African Signature.”

While no one recording could be considered typical for all North American groups, the following example of Salish (so-called “Flathead”) performance, illustrates some of the most typical features discussed above: Audio Example 75: Powow Dance (American Indian Dances, Smithsonian Folkways.)

An excellent assortment of authentic North American Indian performances, including Navaho, Apache, Ponca, Sioux, Taos, Kiowa, etc. can be found on the CD Ceremonial & War Dances, available via Amazon.com. Brief clips from each can easily be streamed, giving a good general sense of some of the differences between each group and also the many commonalities, as enumerated above.

A Disconcerting Discontinuity

Given the many differences between the musical styles of the American north and south, the mainstream theory by which all Native Americans arrived via a northern land bridge becomes especially difficult to maintain. Before attempting to deal with this very problematic issue, I’ll complicate it a bit more:

If the Americas had been populated directly and unproblematically via a Bering Strait land bridge in the manner usually presented, we would expect there to be a clear stylistic continuity between the music of the Paleosiberians of Siberia and the Amerindians of North America. But in fact there is no such continuity. There are certainly resemblances. The two traditions are definitely related. But Paleosiberian singing is usually solo, usually unaccompanied, often noticeably glottalized, whereas Amerindians often sing in unison, with little to no glottalization, and usually accompanied by various types of drums and/or rattles, while the frame drum of the Arctic Shamans appears to be the only instrument native to Paleosiberia.

Significantly, we find only a very few instances of Paleosiberian "breathless" style² among Amerindians, with none at all in the north, where one would expect to find that highly distinctive trait quite frequently if these groups were simply displaced Paleosiberians, as implied by the dominant theory.

In other words, between regions once connected by a land bridge, where we would expect to find continuity, we find discontinuity; and between regions separated by the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean, where we would expect to find discontinuity, we find continuity. Such a situation would seem to demand serious reconsideration of all those theories postulating ancient trans-Pacific voyages.

Did the Earliest Americans Arrive via the Pacific Ocean?

Sorry to disappoint you, but that won’t wash either. In literally every case where archaeological research provides us with dates for possible trans-Pacific contacts, these are relatively recent. Pre-Columbian to be sure, but not really all that old, certainly not old enough to account for long-distance Paleolithic era migrations. It’s not outside the realm of possibility, or even probability, that certain artefacts, traditions, crops, animals, artistic or architectural styles, etc. may have infiltrated the New World via sporadic contacts with Polynesian voyagers, or possibly even, as Needham suggests, Chinese vessels. But there is no evidence that any of these voyages could have taken place at any time prior to roughly one or two thousand years ago, and in all likelihood much later.

There is no question that Polynesian sailors were capable of making long voyages of this kind. If they could reach Easter Island, it is often argued, then why not the western shores of South America? But Easter Island was not settled until, at the very earliest, 700 AD (Easter Island, Wikipedia). Even the westernmost reaches of Polynesia are thought to have been populated no earlier than 2,000 years ago (Polynesia, Wikipedia). Since even the most conservative estimates for the first arrival of humans in the Americas date to 10,000 years ago and more, we can’t rely on Polynesian sailing skills to account for the earliest settlement of the New World. And there is absolutely no evidence for trans-Pacific voyages prior to the advent of the Polynesians.

[Added 3-24-11: I must add that there is also no real evidence for an "African Signature" in Polynesian music, which has its own very distinctive style. While panpipes have been found at archaeological sites, they are apparently no longer being played, so it's not possible to assess performance style. There is, in any case, little to no sign of anything resembling P/B style hocket or interlock in any of the instrumental traditions, although we do find slit drums. Polynesian vocal style can be characterized as "social unison," i.e., all singers sing in more or less the same rhythms at the same time, either in harmony or unison. The most common types of polyphony are parallel harmonies or drones. Contrapuntal interplay of the sort associated with the "African Signature" is not found. It's important to make this clear, in case anyone might want to assume that the P/B elements found in the music of certain Central and South American

groups could be due to relatively recent Polynesian influence.]

The First Wave

In a recently published paper, archaeologist/biologist Walter Neves and his associates present compelling physical evidence for an African-Melanesian-American link and at the same time offer a convincing alternative to the Trans-Pacific theory. Noting that the cranial morphology of the earliest American settlers is “distinct from that displayed by most late and modern Native Americans,” they find it closer to what “can be seen today among Africans, Australians, and Melanesians”; thus, “South America, Central America and possibly North America were populated by human groups with a more generalized cranial morphology before the arrival of the Mongoloids.” Since a more “Australo-Melanesian-like” morphology “was also present in East Asia at the end of the Pleistocene,” they go on to conclude that “transoceanic migrations are not necessary to explain our findings.”

We postulate that after reaching southeast Asia, this stem [Out-of-Africa] population gave rise to at least two different dispersions. One took a southward direction and arrived at Australia around 50 Ka. Sometime between 50 and 20 Ka a second branch dispersed towards the north, and arrived in the Americas by the end of the Pleistocene, bringing with it the same cranial morphology that characterized the first modern humans. (Neves, et al, “A new early Holocene human skeleton from Brazil: implications for the settlement of the New World.” Journal of Human Evolution Volume 48, Issue 4, April 2005, Pages 403-414

doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2004.12.001)

A similar picture can be found in the genetic evidence. Already in 1995, Zago et al. (1995:4) had identified:

three predominant [Alpha]-globin gene haplotypes among Brazilian Indians [, a distribution that] has some features in common with the distributions observed in Southeast Asia, Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia.... The frequency of haplotype IIe among the Amazon Indians is the highest thus far observed in any human population. It occurs regularly in Oceanic and Southeast Asian populations but is absent in Europeans and sub-Saharan blacks.

[Additionally] all examples of haplotype IIa identified in our sample contained...a variant [which] when present is commonly associated with haplotypes IIa or IId in Southeast Asia, Polynesia, Micronesia and Melanesia.

After considering all this evidence, along with a considerable amount of additional genetic data gleaned from the research of others, the authors conclude: “the similarities between native [South] Americans and populations from the Pacific Islands are probably the consequence of ancient common origins that predate the peopling of the Americas and Oceania” (ibid.:5).

A “Beachcomber” Legacy

Stephen Oppenheimer (2004:300-13) holds a very similar view of the earliest migration into the Americas, but takes it one step farther, to accommodate the effects of the Ice Age maximum, which produced a huge glacier ca 20,000 years ago. According to him, if North America had been initially populated prior to the Ice Age, that population would have either been wiped out or forced to move as the glacier expanded—some to refuges in the South, others back where they’d come from in the northwest where at that time there lay a large land mass relatively free of ice, in the vicinity of today’s Bering Strait, which he refers to as the “Beringian refuge.”³ Those already based in the southern part of North America could have continued south, possibly by sea, along the western coast, to Central and South America. This would have been the first “paleoindian” wave described by Neves.

The second wave of Asian immigrants proposed by Neves, those with a more “Mongoloid” morphology, would have been stalled in Beringia until the glacier receded, thus raising the possibility that the two populations may have mixed, both genetically and culturally. As the glacier receded, North America would have been repopulated by groups from both Beringia and the south, while Central and South America would, for the time being at least, have retained its original ''Australo-Melanesian-like'' first-wave population. Ultimately, the largely Mongoloid or mixed populations from the north would have migrated into Central and South America, displacing the first-wavers to marginal refuge areas in the densest jungles and highest mountains, to produce the physically and culturally diverse situation we find there today.

To summarize, the Americas may have originally been populated by at least two different groups: an offshoot of the original Out-of-Africa “beachcombers,” steadily progressing from Indonesia, up the coast of Eastern Asia to the extreme north; a now very different group from Central Asia, which had already broken off from the main line thousands of years earlier. Both might have made it across the arctic land bridge prior to the Ice Age maximum, but only certain groups might have made it far enough south to be safe from the maximum when it finally arrived.

Could these have included direct descendents of the original beachcomber group, bringing with them the canonic/echoic variant of P/B singing style and their hocketing panpipes? If so, then, as they progressed further south, they would have populated certain areas in Mexico, Central America, the Andes, and the Amazon Basin, where their descendents would be living today. According to this line of thought, we do not find panpipes, hocketing horn and trumpet ensembles or canonic/echoic singing north of Mexico because any stragglers from that group would not have survived the worst of the Ice Age.

The groups taking refuge in Beringia may have consisted of two other populations traced by Oppenheimer, whose history had taken them on a different course, through Central Asia and Siberia, where they could have lost touch with the original P/B traditions, since there is now, outside of the Inuit “Throat Singing” tradition (Nattiez 1999), little trace of P/B style singing, or panpipes, north of Mexico. Possibly due to their shared experiences in Beringia during the Ice Age, these northern groups may have developed strong musical and linguistic affinities that would have persisted after they diverged, making America north of Mexico an unusually homogeneous area in both respects.

Mapping American History

Since the history outlined above may be somewhat confusing, I’ve made an attempt to depict it in a series of three maps:

Figure 15.1 New World Migrations

The uppermost map traces, in red, the progress of Oppenheimer’s Out-of-Africa “beachcombers,” appropriately named, since, according to his model, we can trace their slow but steady progress along the coastlines of, first, the Indian Ocean and then the Pacific, all the way up from Southeast Asia to Beringia and beyond, continuing down the coast of North America. The red line makes more sense if we assume these were not only “beachcombers” with a taste for seafood, but also seafarers of sorts, whose relatively primitive vessels would have had no problem so long as they didn’t venture too far beyond sight of land. The blue arrows trace some of the later, post-bottleneck migrations discussed in Chapters Ten and Eleven. Note the two groups in Northeast Asia, poised at the doorstep of the New World. But, as the map suggests, the “beachcombers” may have already beaten them to it.

The map on the lower left highlights, in yellow, the “Beringian refuge” referred to above. Geological research suggests that it was not glaciated during this period, and would have thus been capable of sustaining human life. The large green area represents the extent of the icepack during what is known as the “Last Glacial Maximum,” thought to have lasted roughly between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago. The blue arrows on the left represent the two waves of “post-bottleneck” migration into Beringia posited by Oppenheimer.

The two red arrows pointing northwest represent possible back migrations by “beachcomber” stragglers retreating to Beringia in the wake of the developing glacier. According to Oppenheimer, Beringia may have afforded a refuge to such groups, and other late arrivals, for thousands of years, prior to the glacier’s melting, during which time they would have had the opportunity to interact and presumably intermingle into a single “proto-Amerindian” population. Meanwhile, as indicated by the red arrows to the south, those “beachcombers” whose momentum had carried them beyond the reach of the glacier would have continued on their journey down the west coast of both continents, possibly all the way to the tip of South America.

The third map represents the repopulation of the Americas from Beringia in the wake of the now receding glacier. The red globs represent various “Beachcomber” colonies in Central and South America that would have already been in place for some time. It is, of course, these groups that would still be maintaining African traditions long lost by their distant cousins to the north.

A Mystery Solved?

The complex, but nevertheless convincing, scenario offered by Oppenheimer accounts not only for the distribution of hocketing wind ensembles and canonic/echoic singing but also the proliferation of instruments generally in Central and South America. According to this theory, the Out of Africa nomads would have maintained ancestral traditions rooted in HMC as they traveled north along the coast of East Asia, passed quickly through Beringia and made their way along the eastern Pacific coast down to Central and South America.

The paucity of instruments in the north could be explained by the effects of the Ice Age maximum, which would have covered most of North America, thus wiping out most of the groups living there and forcing the survivors back into the only relative warmth of Beringia. According to Oppenheimer, life would have been brutally difficult for those survivors, in an environment that would have offered very few materials from which to build instruments. Thus, when the descendants of these groups were finally able to move down into North America proper after the Ice Age, it makes sense that they would have lost most of their instrumental traditions.

This explanation is both a bit complicated and necessarily speculative. But what we know about the musical aspect does seem to fit. Oppenheimer’s theory, for better or worse, does offer a meaningful explanation of how musical traditions bearing the “African Signature” could have made it all the way to Central and South America but not survived in the North.

1. Much of the evidence, pro and con, is reviewed in the book Trans-Pacific echoes and resonances: listening once again, by Joseph Needham and Gwei-Djen Lu (World Scientific, 1985).

2. For a definition of Breathless Style, see references to haplogroup B2 in Appendix B.

3. Oppenheimer’s notion of a “Beringian refuge” is supported in a paper by geneticist Erica Tamm et al., Beringian Standstill and Spread of Native American Founders (PLoS ONE 2(9), 2007: e829. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000829), whose research “suggests that ancestors of Native Americans paused when they reached Beringia, during which time New World founder lineages differentiated from their Asian sister-clades” (p. 1).

In Memorium

2011-03-17T05:24:00.000-04:00

Chapter Fourteen: Mysteries of Sahul

2011-03-14T13:37:00.005-04:00

At the time of the Out-of-Africa migrations, water levels in the oceans were much lower than they are today, and as a result many of the islands of Island Southeast Asia were linked with the Malaysian mainland to form a single peninsula, called Sunda; and Australia and New Guinea were also linked to form a single continent, Sahul:

Figure 14.1 Sunda and Sahul

As you can see from the map, the low water levels meant that island hopping from Sunda to Sahul would not have been too much of a challenge -- especially since, as is now suspected, the Out of Africa migrants had already been doing much of their traveling by boat. Since some of the earliest archaeological evidence of modern human habitation comes from Australia, and since some of the arguably “oldest” populations (based on both their genetic and cultural makeup) now live in New Guinea and Australia, it stands to reason that Sahul must have been part of the Out-of-Africa migration.

But there is a problem. If Sahul were populated by Out of Africa migrants when both New Guinea and Australia were joined into a single landmass, and both regions had remained relatively isolated from then to now, as appears to be the case, we would expect the populations now living in both places to be quite similar, both morphologically and culturally. And we would assume they'd be closely related genetically as well. This, however, is not the case.

Melanesia overall, including both New Guinea and the closely related group of islands to its east, known as “Island Melanesia,” is highly differentiated culturally, whereas Australia is much more homogeneous, with almost all aborigines having distinctively “Australoid” features and sharing many traditions in common. Possibly because of the prolonged isolation of each group from its neighbors, due partly to geography, partly to endemic warfare, there are far more different languages and language families in New Guinea than anywhere else on Earth, while Australia is dominated by a single language family, called Pama-Nyungan, with all the others crowded into a relatively small area in the north, the region closest to New Guinea. The unusual distribution pattern for language families in Australia is visible in the following map (from the Wikipedia article, Indigenous Australian Languages).

Figure 14.2 Native Australian Language Families

The huge yellow region is where Pama-Nyungan languages are spoken, while the much smaller, multi-colored region to the north contains just about every other language family on the continent.

The African Signature

The musical picture for New Guinea and Island Melanesia is complex, with several different vocal styles and many different types of instruments. In several cases, we find P/B-related vocal styles, and also instances of instrumental hocket, especially with wind ensembles of pipes, panpipes, trumpets and flutes (see Chapter Nine, Audio Examples 17-22). In other cases we hear unison singing, and in still others, relatively simple part singing similar to that of Western Polynesia. The picture for Australian aboriginal music, on the other hand, is completely different, exhibiting a remarkably high degree of homogeneity and lacking any trace of an African signature.

Among the most compelling instances of the “African Signature” in New Guinea is Audio Example 17, already presented in Chapter Nine -- P/B style yodeled/interlock, as recorded by Steven Feld in the Southern Highlands of New Guinea: Audio Example 17:Bosavi Yodeling (from Bosavi: Rainforest Music of Papua New Guinea).

A somewhat different type of yodeled interlock can be heard among the Abau people of the Upper Sepik River highlands: Audio Example 53: Healing Song (from Songs & Dances from Papua New Guinea, track 5, recorded by John Thornley).

Here is an example of relatively straightforward “shouted hocket,” with yodeling, from the Huli people of the Southern Highlands: Audio Example 54: Huli Yodeling (from Emap FM – Music from Oceania ).

A very similar type of shouted hocket can be heard in this recording of another highland group, the Dani: Audio Example 55: Dani (from Emap FM – Music from Oceania).

Among the Aka Pygmies of Africa a very similar type of hocketed interchange, called “esime,” functions as an interlude between more complex songs (Kisliuk 1998:41): Audio Example 56: Aka esime (from Musical Anthology of the Aka Pygmies, recorded by Simha Arom). Relatively simple hocketed performances of this type are classified as “haplogroup” A1 in the Phylogenetic Tree provided in Appendix B.

Highland vs. Lowland

There are two large language families in New Guinea and Island Melanesia: Austronesian and "Papuan." The former is generally regarded as much more recent than the latter, as it is associated with groups thought to have originated somewhere in southern China or Southeast Asia that expanded during the last 4,000 years or so, first to Melanesia and then to Polynesia. Most of these newer populations settled along the northern and eastern coast of New Guinea, and on many other Melanesian islands. "Papuan" is the name given to the languages of those who were presumably already living in Melanesia when the Austronesians arrived. The so-called "Papuan" languages are actually a large group of unrelated language families -- along with several languages regarded as unaffiliated "isolates" -- spoken by people living, for the most part, in the interior highlands.

Geneticists Alan J. Redd and Mark Stoneking found two mitochondrial DNA clusters among Papua New Guinea highlanders with “coalescent time estimates of ~80,000 and 122,000 years ago, suggesting ancient isolation and genetic drift.” There are indications that “84% of the sample of PNG highlander mtDNA belong to these two clusters” ("Peopling of the Sahul: mtDNA Variation in Aboriginal Australian and Papua New Guinean Populations," American Journal of Human Genetics, 65, 1999, p. 808). This is only one of several such assessments, ethnological, linguistic and genetic, that associate the ancestry of the New Guinea highlanders with the original "Out of Africa" lineage, while most Austronesian speakers of the coastal and lowland areas are considered relatively recent arrivals from the north.

To determine whether the highland-lowland dichotomy could predict the African Signature, a Cantometric search for one of the most distinctive features of P/B, vocal interlock, was conducted for the entirety of the New Guinea sample, with the following results:

Culture Name	Language Family	Location	#
BALIEM	Papuan	Highlands of Irian Jaya -- Baliem Valley	1
BIAMI	Papuan	Southern Highlands	2
BISORIO	Papuan	Highlands -- East Sepik Province	1
DANI	Papuan	Highlands of Irian Jaya -- Baliem Valley	5
EIPO	Papuan	Highlands of Irian Jaya -- Baliem Valley	10
HAMTAI	Papuan	Highlands -- Gulf Province	1
HULI	Papuan	Southern Highlands	2
KOVAI	Papuan	Umboi Isl., Morobe Province, Northeast Coast	1
MONI	Papuan	Highlands	1
OK	Papuan	Highlands of West Papua -- near Irian Jaya	3
YALI	Papuan	Highlands of Irian Jaya -- Baliem Valley	4

Table 14.1 Vocal Interlock -- New Guinea

Of the 11 groups above that “tested positive” for interlock, all are Papuan speakers and all but one are highlanders. Since 23 groups in the entire sample are identified as highland and 22 as coastal or lowland (with an additional 13 I have not yet been able to locate accurately), there does appear to be a strong correlation between the musical evidence and the genetic/linguistic evidence, distinguishing an indigenous highland population, with roots in the early Out-of-Africa migration, from a much more recently arrived coastal/lowland population, associated with Austronesian languages and culture.

The picture for Island Melanesia, is not so simple, however, as the “lowland/highland” dichotomy is not always clear, and many native “Papuan” groups now speak Austronesian languages. Nevertheless, Island Melanesia also contains many instances of the African Signature, as evidenced by Audio Examples 18 and 22 (see Chapter Nine), and the following, truly remarkable, recording of vocal interlock, accompanied by pipes, from the island of Buka, north of Bougainville, in the Solomon Islands: Audio Example 57: Buka Singers with Pipes (from Emap FM – Music from Oceania).

Australian Homogeneity

Melanesian music is by no means limited to P/B-related styles, and is in fact one of the more diversified musical areas on Earth. In contrast, Australia is among the most musically homogeneous regions in the world. Australian aboriginal singing is characterized by tense, nasal vocal style, either solo or unison, the frequent iteration of single notes, with sticks or boomerangs beaten together to produce relatively simple one-beat rhythms or simple variants of the one-beat pattern:

Audio Example 58: Western Australia (from Emap FM – Music from Oceania).

From the Yuendumu Community, Central Australia: Audio Example 59: Traditional Song (from Traditional Aboriginal Music:Sounds from the Bush, Arc Music, track 20).

From Northeast Australia: Audio Example 60: CapeYork (from Emap FM – Music from Oceania).

More or less the same general performance style pervades the entire continent, though occasionally one hears something more complex, with traces of polyphony. The only important musical instrument is the Didgeridoo, which was traditionally found only in the west and may be a relatively recent innovation. Drums, plentiful in Melanesia, are all but absent in Australia. The above descriptions are deceptive, however, as Australian singing and Didgeridoo playing are among the most sophisticated musical art forms in the entire world. Many of the texts that go with these songs are also remarkable examples of highly sophisticated, allusive and complex poetry.

Considering the importance of Australia as the bearer of the earliest archaeological evidence of modern humans outside of Africa, evidence which so strongly supports the Out-of-Africa model, the absence of any trace of the “African signature” in any of its indigenous music is difficult to explain. If the Out of Africa migrants were singing and playing in some version of P/B style, then what could have happened when they got to Australia that made them lose their musical traditions and develop such different ones? And since, as we’ve seen, we do in fact find many instances of the African signature in New Guinea and Island Melanesia, its absence in Australia is especially difficult to understand. Coupled with all the other evidence for major discrepancies, morphological, genetic, linguistic, etc., we are faced with an extremely perplexing mystery.

I would like to propose an explanation that might resolve all or most of the contradictions, which again, like so much else in this book, should be seen as exploratory, speculative and provisional. Let’s begin with some provocative clues:

A Divided History

It has long been thought that the Tasmanians, tragically exterminated during the initial stages of the colonial era, might have been direct descendants of an initial wave of immigration that preceded the entry of australoid peoples. This notion was revived by anthropologist Joseph Birdsell and his associate Norman Tindale, who promoted what they called a "tri-hybrid" theory of Australian history involving three successive waves of migration. According to Birdsell, the first immigrants, the "Barrineans," were Negritos, and it is their remains we see in the "gracile" Mungo Lake skeletons, the earliest (ca 45,000 ya) fossil remains in Australia. The next wave were what he called the "Murrayians," with "caucasoid" features resembling the Ainu. And the last wave were the "Carpentarians," the now dominant "australoids," with affinities to the australoids of India. Birdsell's research confirmed the almost mythic existence of Pygmies in Australia, which made it logical for him to conclude that they were most likely descended from the original "Barrineans."

Figure 14.3 Joseph Birdsell with adult Australian Pygmy

For Birdsell, the early Tasmanians, who may have had a similar morphology, judging from various remains, had also been Negritos, and therefore must also have been descended from the earliest immigrants. Birdsell's "tri-hybrid" theory has been disputed and is no longer a part of mainstream anthropology, possibly due to "political correctness" concerns, as it flew in the face of a popular movement promoting the idea that all aboriginals were descended from the original inhabitants of the continent.

Male vs. Female

An ongoing theme in the genetic story from this part of the world is a surprising male-female distinction, and Australia is no exception. The findings reported in a paper of 2003, by Max Ingman and Ulf Gyllensten, Mitochondrial Genome Variation and Evolutionary History of Australian and New Guinean Aborigines, reveal

a striking difference between the genetic history of females and the reported history of males in the Australian Aboriginal population. . . Kayser et al. (2001) proposed that the high frequency of a unique [Y chromosome] haplotype in Australia is the result of a population expansion that started from a few hundred individuals. In this case, the predominance of a unique Y-chromosome haplotype in Australia would be the result of a founder effect. However, there does not appear to be a corresponding loss of genetic diversity resulting from a bottleneck seen among mitochondrial lineages (p. 1604 -- my emphasis).

In other words, the major discrepancy between Australian Y and mtDNA diversity suggests a bottleneck in the former, yet none in the latter, which seems puzzling -- unless males and females have a very different history on this continent. (Remember, the Y chromosome is found only in males and can represent only male lineages.)

Our mitochondrial [i.e., female line] data imply that some lineages from the populations of Australia and New Guinea have shared a common history since the initial colonization of Sahul. . . . [However,] [t]he lack of a common Y-chromosome haplotype found both in Australia and in the New Guinea highlands (or in any other Melanesian population) argues against the concept that the New Guinean and Australian populations are derived from the same migration event (Kayser et al. 2001). However, the Australia-specific Y chromosome haplotype could have arisen after the colonization of Sahul and therefore is absent in other populations. (my emphasis)

Passage from India?

For many years, anthropologists have speculated regarding what appear to be striking physical similarities between Australian aboriginals and the Vedda of southern India and Sri Lanka, many of whom have a distinctly “australoid” physiognomy. While such comparisons have often been dismissed, recent findings suggest that they could have a genetic basis after all – but, interestingly enough, only on the male line.

In an article titled Gene Flow from the Indian Subcontinent to Australia: Evidence from the Y Chromosome, by Alan Redd et al., 2002, the authors present “strong evidence for an influx of Y chromosomes from the Indian subcontinent to Australia . . .”:

In sum, we found that 50% of the Y chromosomes sampled from aboriginal Australians [haplogroup C*] share common ancestry with a set of Y chromosomes that represent less than 2% of the sampled Indian subcontinent paternal gene pool. . . . (p. 676)

While only 2% of the male gene pool for India might seem insignificant, it's important to remember that the C* haplogroup is found only among certain tribal peoples in south India and Sri Lanka (where we find many australoid types today). It would be very strange indeed if the figure were much higher than 2%, since Australian aborigines bear little physical or cultural resemblance to East Indians generally. However, the figure shoots up to 50% in Australia, a remarkably strong representation. While these results are indeed suggestive, the connection may be relatively recent. According to their estimates, C* dates only to the mid-Holocene, roughly 8,000 years ago, which places this particular migration well past the Out of Africa exodus.

It would be much easier to argue for an Indian-Australian cultural connection if there were any distinctive musical similarities between Tribal India and Aboriginal Australia, but that does not seem to be the case. However, I recently came across a remarkable Youtube clip of dancing among the Chenchu hunter-gatherers of South India that strongly resembles certain types of Australian Aboriginal dance: Video Example Seven -- Children of the Forest:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQSDpRX8bZk&feature=related )

While the very opening contains some interesting moves, the most remarkable similarities with Australia can be found at the 1:30 and 2:30 marks.

Compare the above with the Australian Aboriginal dancing seen in portions of Video Example Eight: Dance During Initiation Ceremony (skip to roughly 30 seconds in):

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6hKzvdtIcg&feature=related )

A Hypothetical Reconstruction

On the basis of the analysis presented above, along with a considerable amount of additional evidence not presented here, but available via my blog, Music 000001 (see especially Posts 297-310), I’ve been able to put together an admittedly very speculative hypothesis, roughly consistent with Birdsell’s “trihybrid” theory, which could account for all or most of the odd discrepancies, morphological, genetic, linguistic and musical, between New Guinea and Island Melanesia on the one hand, and the Australian Aboriginals on the other. Here’s what I think could have happened:

1. Early entry into Sahul by island hopping from Sunda, in the immediate wake of the Out of Africa migration. The earliest immigrants would have been a small band of HMP (Hypothetical Migrant Population) descendants, who would have retained an African morphology and an African culture and value system, based largely on HMC. These early immigrants would not have been seriously affected by the population bottleneck(s) I've associated with the Toba eruption (or some equally devastating event), as they would presumably have been living far enough to the east of India at the time to be only minimally affected, and therefore would have retained their original African characteristics to at least some significant degree.

2. It seems reasonable to think in terms of a fairly rapid expansion along the coast of the entirety of Sahul, followed by a very long period of stability, in which these relatively peaceful and cooperative hunter-gatherer descendants of HBP and HMP could have lived together in harmony for literally tens of thousands of years.

3. On the basis of the genetic evidence for both a highly contrastive history for males and females in Australia and a close Y chromosome association between Indian and Australian australoid populations, we can posit a second migration, occurring many thousands of years later, of mostly male australoid hunter-gatherers, whose ancestry would have stemmed from the South Asian centered bottleneck posited in Chapter Ten. According to Redd et al (2002),

The divergence times reported here correspond with a series of changes in the Australian anthropological record between 5,000 years ago and 3,000 years ago, including the introduction of the dingo; the spread of the Australian Small Tool tradition; the appearance of plant-processing technologies, especially complex detoxification of cycads; and the expansion of the Pama-Nyungan language over seven-eighths of Australia. Although there is no consensus among anthropologists, the former three changes may have links to India, perhaps the most relevant of which is the introduction of the dingo, whose ocean transit was almost certainly on board a boat. In addition, Dixon noted some similarities between Dravidian languages of southern India and Pama-Nyungan languages of Australia.

4. We can now extrapolate backward to speculate on how the arrival of these strangers could have led to the conditions we now see. And the first thing to consider is the fact that, in order to produce the largely australoid population we see in Australia today, the more recent immigrants would have to have mated with the “native” women, probably forcibly at first, and at the same time largely either killed, displaced or enslaved the native men, wherever they encountered them. This would explain the “different histories” of males and females we see in the genetic evidence. The mtDNA (female line) picture would not reflect the presence of men from a completely different population, but the Y chromosome evidence would -- and that does seem to be the case. Over time, as the more aggressive and belligerent newcomers expanded throughout the continent, the original inhabitants would have done what so many relatively non-aggressive, non-competitive, non-violent peoples have done throughout history -- retired to easily defended or undesirable refuge areas. This would explain the special status of Tasmania, which could have served as a last stand for some of the natives as they retreated southeast to the point farthest away from the most likely point where the newcomers would have arrived, the northwest. And since Tasmania was originally a kind of peninsula with a fairly narrow land bridge, that might have worked for them as a last line of defense until the sea level rose and they became completely isolated.

5. Since Australia is relatively flat and easily traversed, the indigenous males would not have had much chance of survival, but could have been hunted down and slaughtered or enslaved, and their women appropriated as wives. Northeast Queensland contains a tropical forest, which was until recently, according to Birdsell's research, the home of a few small groups of Pygmies, who may have originally retreated to this area as a refuge, possibly many thousands of years ago. But the most obvious refuge area would have been to the north, in what is now New Guinea, and it is the highlands of New Guinea that we can posit as the most likely refuge area for the majority of the retreating natives. If the newcomers had arrived while New Guinea was still attached to Australia, the refugees could have made their way north by land, but if the sea had already separated the two regions, they could have retreated in boats or rafts, at least while the distance was not too great. The australoid invaders would have followed them, and at that time taken over the New Guinea coast, while the natives retreated into the highlands.

6. The next important event in the history of this region is the advent of the so-called “Austronesians,” who are thought to have migrated to various points in New Guinea and Island Melanesia anywhere from 6,000 to roughly 4,000 years ago. The newly arrived Austronesians appear to have displaced most of the australoids along the coastal regions to the north and east. Their only recourse would have been a retreat into the highlands, which would therefore have come to harbor a mixed population, partly of “negrito” and partly of australoid origin. Since these groups would have formerly been bitter enemies, it's not difficult to see how the endemic warfare we now see in the New Guinea highlands could have originated at this point, although many of these populations seem ultimately to have merged, both physically and culturally.

If my scenario is correct, then the current situation in the former Sahul could be described in the following terms:

1. in Australia, the descendants of males from the second wave of migration and females from the first, with australoid morphology, speaking, for the most part, a Pama-Nyungan language; 2. in New Guinea, descendants of the original “negrito” settlers, with a degree of australoid intermixture, now surviving mostly in the highlands, but also along portions of the coast, living as foragers and part-time horticulturalists, speaking a wide variety of very different “Papuan” languages, and retaining at least some of their original African traditions, including, in some cases, P/B-related musical styles; 3. in New Guinea, descendants of population 1, formerly based on the New Guinea coast, now living for the most part in the highlands as forager/horticulturalists, possibly intermixed with population 2, both biologically and culturally -- also speaking “Papuan” or in some cases Austronesian languages; 4. relatively recent Austronesian immigrants, speaking Austronesian languages, and inhabiting, for the most part, the northern and eastern coastal and lowland areas of New Guinea.

Chapter Thirteen: Europe, Old And New

2011-03-10T15:28:00.005-05:00

The significance of archaic survivals in remote refuge areas was brought home to me with unusual force when reading Joseph Jordania’s book, Who Asked the First Question (Jordania 2006). In his very thorough and convincing consideration of European vocal traditions, Jordania demonstrates that societies where polyphonic vocalizing comes more or less naturally, as part of long established oral traditions, tend to be found in “refuge” areas, such as mountainous regions, islands, forests, etc. -- and this appears to be a continent-wide phenomenon, extending to the British Isles as well. Surrounding these isolated pockets, oral traditions of a different kind prevail, characterized by solo singing and/or group vocalizing in unison and octaves. Both types are clearly “old,” but the striking difference in their distribution -- the one continuous and “mainstream,” the other discontinuous and marginal -- could be an important clue, not only to their relative age as distinct musical practices, but to our understanding of European pre-history generally.

Following the lead of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1994), Jordania associates the polyphonic traditions with what she called “Old Europe,” an archaic culture either absorbed or displaced by a migration from western and/or central Asia, dating from roughly 4,000 BC, of a more aggressive, and ultimately far more successful, “proto Indo-European” culture (see below), bringing with it a very different musical style. While certain of Gimbutas’ theories, such as her “civilization of the Goddess” idea, have been regarded with justified skepticism, the considerable body of musical evidence offered by Jordania tends to support her notion of a once ubiquitous but now marginalized “Old European” culture of great antiquity, fragments of which have survived in various refuge areas throughout the continent well into the Twentieth Century.

As illustrated by the many transcriptions in Jordania’s book, “Old European” polyphonic singing is highly varied, ranging from interlocking counterpoints and hockets stylistically close to P/B (see previous chapter), to various types of drone polyphony, parallel harmonies, or combinations of any two or three of the above. In some places, the harmonies are “smooth,” in a manner familiar to modern ears, but in other places, such as the highland regions of Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, etc., harsh dissonances are favored. While many of these traditions do not carry the “African signature” precisely as I’ve defined it, the tightly blended polyphonic choral practices found among so many of these groups have many typically “African” characteristics. Whether they represent derivations from musical styles introduced to Europe via the Out of Africa migration, or are the result of completely independent processes must remain, for now, an open question.

Here are some examples of so-called "Old European" polyphony:

From the mountains of Liguria, in northern Italy: Musical Example 43: Tralallero (from Italian Treasury: Folk Music & Song of Italy, Rounder Records, recorded by Alan Lomax).

From Basque country, in the Pyrenees mountains of northern Spain: Musical Example 44 : Koadrila Batsen Gara (from The Spanish Recordings: Basque Country, recorded by Alan Lomax, track 6).

From the Pirin mountains of southwest Bulgaria: Musical Example 45 :Vetar Vee (from Bulgarian Village and Folk Music, recorded by Ethel Raim and Martin Koenig)

From the forests of Belarus (formerly Byelorussia): Musical Example 46: Belarus Folksong (from Folk Music of the USSR, Smithsonian Folkways 4535, compiled by Henry Cowell).

Perhaps the most astonishing example of an “Old European” survival is a traditional Basque instrument called the Xalaparta, as demonstrated here, via youtube -- Video Example Two, Ttukunak:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_tgBF57eBo&feature=related )

[Added 3-11-11: As Maju reminded me in a recent comment, the traditional Txalaparta is a wooden instrument, consisting of no more than two pieces. Although the youtube performance is more typical of how younger people are innovating on the basis of the Txalaparta tradition, the aspect that interests me most, i.e. the precise, hocketed interaction of the performers, is demonstrated quite nicely here.]

The Xalaparta is closely related to an instrumental ensemble almost certainly of African origin and widely found among many indigenous groups as part of the "African Signature": stamping tubes. It may also be related to the xylophone, though that connection is more remote. Both traditions were in all likelihood a part of Out-of-Africa migrant culture (HMC), maintained through their epic migrations to Asia, Indonesia, Melanesia and, of course, Europe.

To illustrate, here’s a youtube video of stamping tubes from Ghana: Video Example Three: Traditional Bamboo Orchestra in Mesomagor:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZ7KAI4qqf0 )

[Added 3-11-11: The following youtube video, by ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp, illustrates how stamping tubes are prepared and performed among the ‘Are ‘are people of the Solomon Islands, in Melanesia. Video Example Four: 'Are 'are Stamping Tubes:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVOUz6hWBHQ ) ]

Different types of group interaction can be seen if you skip to about 6 and a half minutes in.

A Romanian monastic tradition known as toaca, appears stylistically related to both Txalaparta and stamping tube performance, though in this case wooden hammers are used. On this youtube video we see as many as four nuns performing a complexly interactive hocket. Video Example Five: Toaca:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQBjt65XjK0&feature=related )]

The European Mainstream

The most typical vocal styles of “mainstream” European folksong, once commonly heard in lowland farms, villages, and small towns throughout the continent, tend to be monophonic, highly word-oriented lyric songs or ballads, in strophic (i.e., verse) form, often with a refrain. According to the terminology adopted by Alan Lomax, the polyphonic vocal traditions of the remote highland areas are considered “Old European,” while the monophonic, strophic “folk songs” of the lowland villages and towns are “Modern European.”

A few examples of "Modern European" strophic song:

England: Audio Example 47:Lord Lovell (from An English Folk Music Anthology, Smithsonian Folkways).

Hungary: Audio Example 48: Come on Girls to the Spinning House (from Folk Music of Hungary, Smithsonian Folkways, collected under the supervision of Bela Bartok).

Lithuania: Audio Example 49: Riding Across a Forest of Green (from Lithuanian Folk Songs in the United States, Smithsonian Folkways).

Italy: Audio Example 50: Stornello Baresi (from Italian Folk Songs and Dances, Smithsonian Folkways).

If Old European polyphonic singing is rooted in archaic traditions either stemming from, or closely related to, the culture of the earliest African colonists, then what could be the source of these much simpler monophonic songs and ballads? For clues, we will need to delve farther into the fascinating theories of Marija Gimbutas.

The “Kurgan” Invasion

According to Gimbutas’ model, Indo-European language and culture developed in the “Dnieper/Volga” region in the “earlier half of the 4th Millennium BC” and spread from there in many directions, both to the east and west, facilitated by Kurgan mastery of horsemanship. The Wikipedia article on the Kurgan Hyphothesis includes the following “Map of Indo European migrations from ca. 4000 to 1000 BC according to the Kurgan model”:

Figure 13.1 Indo-European Migrations (Wikipedia)

From this map we can get an idea of what Gimbutas is talking about when she associates the Indo-European migration (or, if you prefer, invasion) into Europe with the destruction and ultimate marginalization of “Old European” culture. Note the yellow area in the map, between the Caspian and Black Seas, representing a mountainous area, roughly where Georgia is located, that was left unconquered by the aggressive and warlike Indo-Europeans.

“Matristic” vs. “Patriarchal

In an interview with David Jay Brown & Rebecca McCLen Novick, Gimbutas speaks of her childhood in Lithuania, a country which, at the time, was, as she says, “still fifty percent pagan”:

In some areas, up to the nineteenth and twentieth century, there were still beliefs alive in Goddesses and all kinds of beings. So in my childhood I was exposed to many things which were almost prehistoric, I would say. And when I studied archaeology, it was easier for me to grasp what these sculptures mean than for an archaeologist born in New York, who doesn't know anything about the countryside life in Europe.

Such observations, coupled with many years of archaeological research, led her to develop a fascinating hypothesis associating the destruction of Old European civilization with the migration into Europe of “proto-Indo-European people” from southern Russia. The “Kurgans” were violent horse-mounted conquerors, who introduced their "patriarchal" social structure, with the result that European culture became “hybridized.”

According to Gimbutas, Old European culture, prior to the invasion of the Kurgans was “matristic.”

I call it matristic, not matriarchal, because matriarchal always arouses ideas of dominance and is compared with the patriarchy. But it was a balanced society, it was not that women were really so powerful that they usurped everything that was masculine. Men were in their rightful position, they were doing their own work, they had their duties and they also had their own power. This is reflected in their symbols where you find not only goddesses but also, Gods. . .

While the Old Europeans were nonviolent and had no weapons other than weapons for hunting, the Kurgans had military weapons and also horses, which gave them a powerful military advantage. When they invaded, the indigenous inhabitants retreated high into the hills, “sometimes in places which had very difficult access.”

There was evidence of immigration and escape from these violent happenings and a lot of confusion, a lot of shifts of population. People started to flee to places like islands and forests and hilly areas.

Whether there was literally a “cult of the Goddess” or “civilization of the Goddess,” as Gimbutas claimed, is less important, as I see it, than her theories regarding an essentially “matristic,” egalitarian and pacifist “Old European” culture, prior to the transformation of Europe by the Indo-Europeans. The Old Europe she describes seems quite close in many ways to the “Utopian” culture of the African Pygmies and Bushmen, as commonly described in so much of the literature. (See Chapters Three, Four and Six.)

To help us understand how “African” Old Europe may have been, let’s compare two sets of images, the first an example of Paleolithic rock art from southeastern Spain, as presented by Gimbutas in Civilization of the Goddess (p. 187), the second a selection of four unrelated rock art images from Southern Africa, usually associated with the Bushmen culture of anywhere from several hundreds to several thousands of years ago:

Figure 13.2 Paleolithic Rock Art -- from Spain (Gimbutas 1991)

Figure 13.3 Images from rock paintings attributed to Bushmen artists -- southern Africa

The Ancient Roots of “Modern European” Song

If the exuberant folk polyphony that so deeply impressed both Lomax and Jordania can be associated with “Old Europe,” can we associate the more thoughtful and poetic monophonic folk songs of “Modern Europe” with the culture of Kurgan invaders and their Indo-European languages? In search of an answer, let’s turn to the musical traditions of the Central Asian horse nomads, where highly poetic, monophonic, strophic songs are typical, and polyphonic vocalizing is conspicuous by its absence.

An excellent example of Central Asian strophic song at its most rhapsodic is provided in the soundtrack of yet another youtube video, from Kyrgyzstan, which will also give you an idea of how important horses are in this culture: Video Example Six: Kyrgyz Song:

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrETbBI1kOU&feature=related )

Equally impressive singing, and playing, is found among the neighboring Kazaks: Audio Example 51: Kanapya. Note how effectively the dombra rhythms evoke the sound of horse’s hoofs.

Compare the above with this northern Albanian ballad: Audio Example 52: Zenel Kadrija.

While there appears to be a clear connection between the Kazak performance and the one from Albania, the connection between Central Asian strophic song and that of the more straightforward, simple, and unaccompanied strophic “folk songs” of mainstream Europe (cf. Audio Examples 47-50) isn’t quite so clear. In both cases, we find a musical syntax based on clearly delineated phrases, tailored to fit carefully contrived poetic lines, with the music repeating almost note for note with each successive verse. But the Central Asian examples are often much longer, more rhapsodic and rhythmically flexible, and also, of course, usually accompanied by plucked string instruments such as the dombra, of a sort that we don’t find in western Europe until the Middle Ages.

In my phylogenetic map of music style (see Appendix B), I labeled both types of strophic song B2a2, as opposed to another important solo style labeled B2a1, the “Elaborate Style” discussed in Chapter Eleven. According to this model, both styles derive from B2, the “Breathless Style” of the Paleosiberians and Saami, rooted in the “bottleneck event” discussed in Chapter Ten. B2a1 and B2a2 differ from Breathless Style in that phrasing has become an important feature, while Breathless Style is characterized by musical “run-on sentences,” interrupted by arbitrary gasps for air. It’s possible that the Central Asiatic strophic song represents an intermediate evolutionary phase between B2a1 and B2a2 rather than a simple branching from B2. It isn’t as highly embellished or as “through-composed” as “elaborate” style, but it does share in some of its rhapsodic freedom, and the relation between the instrument(s) and the voice (unison or heterophony) is similar as well.

Is the European strophic song related to the strophic songs of Central Asian horse nomads via the mutual influence of the “Kurgan” horse nomads postulated by Gimbutas? Or does it have some other source, possibly as an independent outgrowth from Breathless Style? Could it be an amalgam of both? Or a completely new “independent invention”? Can we see it as part of a “modern” tradition that supplanted “Old Europe” after a “Kurgan invasion” and the introduction of Indo-European languages? Or is it a survival of a much older cultural strain, associated with the earliest development of farming and herding in Europe. In any case, this is a style that seems to have pervaded the vocal performances of most farms and villages through the length and breadth of Europe for many thousands of years.

The Role of Women

When Alan Lomax collected folk music in Spain and Italy during the 1950's, he was struck by certain differences in singing style between north and south in both countries that appeared related to the role of women. Specifically, where women played a more important and active role in the society and had a certain amount of sexual freedom, as in the north, voices tended to be more open, relaxed and “well blended,” and there was a tendency to sing in groups, often polyphonically. Where women played a subordinate role, and their sexuality was strictly controlled, as in the south, voices tended to be constricted and tense, solo singing was more common, and group singing usually in harsh unison. Since Lomax was something of a Freudian -- and a disciple of Margaret Mead -- it's not difficult to see how he could have associated sexual tension with vocal tension, male-female harmony with musical harmony.

Since this was one of the principal “epiphanies” that led him to focus on the stylistic aspects of music, the testing of this hypothesis became one of the earliest goals of Cantometrics. Drawing upon the “Ethnographic Atlas,” a database compiled by ethnologist George Murdock, containing, among other things, data pertaining to the role of women in a number of different societies, Lomax found correlations that did, indeed, appear to confirm his initial hypothesis.

Of particular interest is a graph appearing on p. 167 of Folk Song Style and Culture, with “productive complementarity” as the horizontal axis, and mean percentage of polyphonic singing as the vertical. The graph progressively rises from left to right, indicating a growing tendency, worldwide, for polyphonic vocalizing as the participation of women in food producing activities, according to Murdock's ratings, increases (M and N indicate male domination for such tasks, D and E rough equality of males and females and F and G almost exclusively female participation):

Figure 13.4 "Polyphony and Complementarity" (Lomax et al. 1968:167)

Interestingly, there is hardly any difference between female polyphony (scored line) and polyphony generally (solid line), indicating that the differences between “men's songs” and “women's songs” (an issue that has received much attention over the last 25 years or so) may matter less than differences in the way women are treated in the society as a whole.

While many of the relationships Lomax found between song style and social structure remain either problematic or difficult to assess, his correlations between male-female “complementarity” and aspects of song style such as polyphony, tonal blend and vocal tension have always seemed more convincing. While it's not clear whether such a correlation can be regarded as truly universal, it does seem to hold for large portions of Africa, Europe and Asia.

Lomax's notion of complementarity seems quite close to Gimbutas' idea of the matristic -- a “balanced society” where women and men live and work together on a more or less equal basis. Lomax described this type of society as follows:

[W]here women take a leading recognized part in the central activity of a society, such as supplying the main source of food, they assume, at least in this respect, a complementary, or more or less equal, interactive relationship with men. . . People tend to sing in wide voices in societies where women are most secure in their productive and sexual roles and where, therefore, they are freest to relate fully to the males (pp. 199-200).

While Lomax often writes as though he sees a cause and effect relationship between sexual and vocal tension, complementarity and polyphony, etc., he also associates polyphonic vocalizing and wide, relaxed voices with the same “Old Europe” that Gimbutas associated with the earlier, matristic societies that dominated all of Europe prior to the advent of the Indo-Europeans. Which raises a fascinating question: are we dealing with a patently Freudian situation, where tensions between men and women, both sexual and political, tend to promote behavioral tension, as expressed by tightly constricted throats and harshly blended monophonic group performance? -- or do the differences, both sexual and musical, reflect a contrast between two types of culture, the matristic, complementary, “polyphonic” culture of Africa and Old Europe vs. the patriarchal, repressive, violent, monophonic culture of Indo-European invaders?

Is there some sort of universal cause and effect relation at work between the role of women in society and certain aspects of musical style? More specifically, is there a cause and effect relation, as Lomax claimed, between male-female complementarity and polyphonic vocalizing, relaxed voices, and “good” tonal blend? Or are the correlations he found due to historical processes at work in a specific time and place -- in this case neolithic Europe -- affecting both the treatment of women and many other aspects of culture, as Gimbutas' theories suggest?

Universalist claims of this sort can be tested by determining whether or not the correlations still hold in a completely different socio-historical context. Consider, for example, native North America. Here we have both hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists, simple tribal cultures and advanced civilizations. We also have patrilineal societies, where women are clearly subordinate, and matrilineal societies, where women have considerable influence and freedom.

Yet throughout the length and breadth of this vast area, we find only the barest trace of polyphonic vocalizing, mostly in very limited areas, such as pockets in the Northwest Coast and, in northern California, among the Hupa, who are patrilineal. The music of just about every other native American tribe north of Mexico, whether matrilineal or patrilineal, aggressive and warlike, or relatively quiet and passive, is dominated by unison singing and moderately tense voices, with little to no trace of polyphony. Evidently, the correlation Lomax found between complementarity and polyphony cannot, therefore, be regarded as universal, as it doesn't seem to apply in North America.

As for the other musical characteristics Lomax associated with complementarity -- relaxed voices and “good” tonal blend -- the picture is not so clear. The Navaho and many Pueblo groups are matrilineal -- and have indeed been characterized as “Apollonian” (as opposed to “Dionysian”) cultures. Their voices do in fact tend to be more relaxed than is typical for native Americans in the north -- and Pueblo singing is noted for its smooth vocal blend. The Apache, however, close relatives of the Navaho, and also matrilineal, tend to have a more strident, tense and harshly blended style of vocalizing. Since it's not clear whether or not the Apache pattern could be a response to relatively recent historical events, additional research would be necessary before a firm conclusion could be reached.

Returning to our consideration of Europe, we are probably safe in concluding that Old European polyphonic vocalizing, associated by Lomax with the role of women, was most likely the product of historically contingent, rather than universally necessary, forces -- as implied by both Gimbutas and Jordania. There would seem to be no hard and fast rule causing humans to sing in harmony wherever women are treated as equals, though this very interesting issue is still open to further investigation.

Nevertheless, as Gimbutas would surely point out, the Old European pattern does suggest that gender-balance, acephalous, egalitarian political systems, group integration, cooperation, and sharing, along with an overall lack of competiveness and aggression, do seem to go hand in hand with musical practices expressing harmoniousness, social integration and simple pleasure. It does seem reasonable, therefore, to associate smoothly blended, relaxed voices, singing spontaneously together in harmony, with the sort of harmonious culture one might expect when both women and men are socially integrated on a free and equal basis, with minimal opportunities for sexual rivalry and tension to arise. In other words, while the correlations Lomax discovered do not necessarily point to cause and effect relationships, they strongly suggest that the various aspects of any culture can best be evaluated as parts of an integrated whole.