The Singing Neanderthals
by Steven Mithen
Let's get the title out of the way first. You have to have the Neanderthals, because any book shopper seeing "Neanderthals" alongside "Heidelberg Man" will go for the first every time. It has to use the N-word even if only a small part of the text is about those folks.
And then comes the disclaimer: I'm really not qualified to judge the evidence and arguments Mithen presents, so I'll try not to say whether you should believe his conclusions or not.
The thesis, supported by lots and lots of skulls, is that language is only the latest mode that hominids (we and our ancestors back to some 6 million years ago) have used to communicate. In earlier states of our genus, until sometime between 200,000 and 40,000 years ago, we didn't speak, but we did have ways to convey important messages. Mithen postulates a holistic, mimetic, musical, multi-modal form of communication.
Which, perhaps tellingly, he abbreviates as Hmmmm.
Holistic: The message was entire, not broken into parts (sentences and words). Mimetic: It involved acting-out, for example signifying an animal by taking its posture. Musical: Pitch, melody and rhythm were crucial (and evidence says our genus could do pitch and breath control before we could do words). Multi-modal: We used several of these techniques at once. The picture that sticks in the mind is of a Heidelberg Man performing a story before members of his troop gathered around the campfire. When the story has a mammoth in it, he hangs his arm in front and roars; he dances the flight of a bird; he vocalizes in meaningful sounds. It's important not to think of this communication as music, as dance, certainly not as speech: It's all one act.
True? Couldn't say, but the key ideas do hang together, the book provokes thought about how we communicate today, and the text is supported by more than 50 pages of notes. If this account describes the origin of language, small wonder we have ended up with such a supple but hideously complicated way of expressing ourselves. The Singing Neanderthals is not your beach book for 2007, but it makes a very tight-seeming case for a novel proposition. Don't miss it if your interest is in the history of language (or if you've wondered why we don't all have perfect pitch).
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Books and plays:
History and Archaeology
The Singing Neanderthals