Music may Have Evolved 30 Million Years Ago, Says Study

Music skills evolved at least 30 million years ago in the common ancestor of humans and monkeys, finds new study.

According to the study, this could help explain why chimpanzees drum on tree roots and monkey calls sound like singing.

The study also suggests an answer to this chicken-and-egg question: Which came first, language or music? The answer appears to be music.

lLead author Andrea Ravignani told Discovery News that musical behaviors would constitute a first step towards phonological patterning, and therefore language.

For the study, Ravignani, a doctoral candidate at the University of Vienna's Department of Cognitive Biology, and his colleagues focused on an ability known as "dependency detection."

This has to do with recognizing relationships between syllables, words and musical notes. For example, once we hear a certain pattern like Do-Re-Mi, we listen for it again. Hearing something like Do-Re-Fa sounds wrong because it violates the expected pattern.

Normally monkeys don't respond the same way, but this research grabbed their attention since it used sounds within their frequency ranges.

In the study, squirrel monkeys sat in a sound booth and listened to a set of three novel patterns. (The researchers fed the monkeys insects between playbacks, so the monkeys quickly got to like this activity.)

Whenever a pattern changed, similar to our hearing Do-Re-Fa, the monkeys stared longer, as if to say, "Huh?"

The squirrel monkeys demonstrated that they understood sound patterns-and when they changed.

This ability, central to language and music, therefore evolved at least 30 million years ago in the small and furry tree-dwelling primate that was the last common ancestor of humans and monkeys. It's likely that all primates today share the skills.

The study is published in the journal Biology Letters.

Source: ANI