The conjecture of a singing primate as human ancestor

"There are two conventional ways in which one can approach the problem of the significance of music in human life. One is to examine its origins If we could understand how began, perhaps we could better understand its fundamental meaning. The second way is to examine how music has actually been used. What functions has music served in different societies throughout history?" Anthony Storr

If we want to understand why the "musical behaviour" is a cultural trait that is so widespread to be considered unanimously by anthropologists as a universal features of the human species, we must try to outline the possible routes trees that may have been made by our distant ancestors towards the production of tonal vocal sounds. Considering the dichotomy between innate and culturally learned behaviour, the essential question that I expose in the study entitled "Singing at Dawn", is as follows: do we directly descend from a singing primate (the singing behaviour in primates has a very strong innate component and therefore genetic or - most probably - epigenetic) or do we begin to sing in a cultural (memetic) way, using a neuromuscular and respiratory plasticity that had evolved for causes very different from the production of tonal sounds? In this second hypothesis, which, although it has never been formalized, is generally considered by the researchers the more likely, the memes of singing, invented one or more times by some talented innovator, would be passed on to our ancestors through lifelong imitation, since it guaranteed some type of advantage to their bearers. I intended, instead, to closely explore the first possibility, which has never been seriously examined in depth until now. The results were somewhat surprising, enabling me to develop the conjecture of a singing hominine primate among our direct ancestors. The possibility to falsify this conjecture, noticing the progress of evolutive genetics and neurosciences, should not be too far away. The starting point in searching for the origins of human singing is necessarily the fork of the two evolutionary lines (of the two bushes, if you prefer) that led on a side to all of us and on the other side to chimpanzees. Paleoanthropology and genetics have recently placed it in the period between 5 and 7 millions years ago. This choice is justified by the fact that chimps do not show any singing inclination and in fact they are not among the very few singing species of primates. In theory they might have missed this feature in the course of time, but this appears unlikely, since their natural habitat has remained virtually unchanged until today. There are clear reasons for the rarity of the singing behaviour in primates, reasons which are also more generally valid for the entire animal kingdom. The main of these is the strategic value of the duration of the single calls in a predator-prey relationship. Sustained Tonal Sounds (STS) constitute an essential part of the vocal repertoires used in the singing behaviour. But the animals, as has been demonstrated (for example by Heffner), are able to improve their performance in locating a sound source if individual sounds that are emitted have a longer duration. So the singing behaviour should emerge only in the conditions in which it does not involve any alteration of the predator-prey relationship (a reduction in fitness). For medium size primates, ordinarily subjected to the pressure of one or more predators, this should essentially mean that such behaviour can emerge only in the species which are permanently living in the canopies. And in fact, this is exactly what we observe today in nature. Analysing in detail the behaviour of the singing primates, another common feature emerges: a monogamic social structure, otherwise very rare in primates. The innate sing assumes in this social context a fundamental value for mate selection and for the maintenance of the pair bond. Singing behaviour, monogamy and living in the canopy habitat seem to constitute jointly an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy (ESS) in primates, though a rare one. This means that different species which show the singing behaviour do not necessarily descend from a common ancestor, but may acquire (or lose) this feature in relation to the habitat that they have to face, and in a relatively quick way

(from an evolutionary point of view), probably a few tens of thousands of years. This is exactly as it is observed in nature: Indridae and Hylobatidae, the main singing primates, show a considerable behavioural assonance although their common ancestor is ages ago in time (about 55 millions years ago). It also means that the mutations that make possible innate singing are borne by the regulatory part of the DNA more than by the codifying one (genes). Considering the available paleoanthropologic documentation, together with the acquired knowledge about primates phylogeny and their social behaviour, it was possible to formulate more precisely the genetic/memetic dichotomy, assuming for the hominine line, alternatively: A) An archaic and innate origin of singing, to be dated approximately between 6 and 4,5 million years ago, at the beginning of Pliocene or just before. Ardipithecus ramidus in my opinion is the best candidate to exemplify the ancestor, theoretically being able to permanently occupy a canopy habitat and to be monogamous, which could therefore also be a singing primate. Also Orrorin tugenensis show the signs of an arboreal bipedalism, that in primates today is also closely linked to the canopy habitat. B) A most recent and entirely cultural origin of singing, arose with the Homo genus in low Pleistocene, around 1,8 and 0,6 million years ago. This culture would have been adopted at least from all the descendants of African and European ergaster to then spread to the entire planet together with modern sapiens. I have tried to identify the existence of verifiable discrepancies between the two alternatives, investigating the genetic, ontogenetic and neurological aspects of the singing behaviour, the perception of the tone and the tonotopic maps, the relationship between sound gesture and emotion, the lateralization of the functions related to hearing and the sound-memory relationship. I have also considered the acquired filogenetic and ontogenetic evidences about the origin of language, a theme that is inevitably interwoven with the origin of singing. Four specific research paths have emerged which are needed to complete the epistemological journey towards the solution of the problem: 1. the first path is aimed at a better definition of the environmental forces capable of being the constraints which operate on the form of acoustic calls, and should lead to a scientific definition of that "fundamental unit of sing" I have labelled as Sustained Tonal Sounds (STS). 2. the second is aimed to clarify the biochemical mechanisms that trigger the singing at dawn in diurnal primates. We already know that the longitudinal transmissibility factor makes the spreading of singing more effective if this is produced in the early hours of the morning, but we need to understand if there is also a traceable biochemical ignition for this behaviour. The recent discovery that a strong light induces in humans the activation of some areas of the auditive cortex could be an important first step in this direction. Closely connected with this matter is the definition and dating, in primates, of any mutations in sexual hormones that are related to the singing behaviour, as it has already been verified in birds. The calculation of the limits of the applicability of singing behaviour in the canopy habitat is also part of this path, which is, above all, the definition of the maximum size of the individuals that may form a group composed by monogamic families in this kind of habitat. 3. The third path deals with the understanding of how the primary auditory cortex tonotopic maps in primates function. We know that those of men and of macaques work differently, but we ignore the way they operate in the singing species and in chimpanzees. We must also investigate the epigenetic

training of the perception of complex tones as unitary, perception that we possess unlike macaques. My hypothesis is that this is a consequence of singing species babies exposure, during the prenatal phase of learning, to the sustained tones of the species singing. The progressive exclusion of higher frequencies caused by the mothers body and by the amniotic fluid, could drive the neurogenesis of the unborn child to use the fundamental frequencies and the first harmonics of the complex tones as a "parsimonious bases of calculation ". Therefore the unitary perception of tones would be typical in the singing species. The search of genetic and/or epigenetic components of the differentiated otoacustic bursts, identified recently in babies, is also part of this third path as well as the search of its presence or absence in other species of the animal kingdom, which could tell us something important about the genesis of the lateralization of functions that is observed in brain starting from the secondary auditory cortex. 4. The fourth path is to clarify those aspects of vocalic sounds that in human oral language seem to transcend the "radical arbitrariety" of the signifier/meaning relationship. This direction of this research, already relatively advanced, could help us to understand better how the language may arise starting from the territorial calls and/or by the species singing, in other words if it is appropiate to think to the historical emergency of language as the transformation of a variety, already gained, of the acoustic behaviour in a new type of complexity, obtained by simple accumulation of signifiers and meanings. This way would be appropriate to consider the transformation that has resulted from the calls to the language as a normal exaptation. The conclusion is that, although at the current state of knowledge the dichotomy between innate and cultural origin of the human singing is still indecidibile, the first of the two hypothesis is not devoid of substance and indeed a lot of evidences are accumulating to favor it. Not only, but the idea of a singing hominine ancestor could contain in itself the solution of two other enigmas concerning our evolution: the origin of bipedalism and the origin of language. It was recently shown as how the bipedal posture in orangutans is an adaptation to the conditions imposed by the canopies habitat. Both the Indridae and the Hylobatidae (the largest among the singing primates) occupy permanently a canopy habitat avoiding the ground, and the few times that they are constrained to move on the ground they adopt a bipedal-like locomotion. A singing hominine which could no more permanently inhabit a canopy environment, would have had an easier access to bipedalism and would have probably practiced the acoustic communication as the preferred form of intersubjective relationship, but would have been forced to turn his singing (not anymore feasible as on the ground) in shorter calls through the insertion of consonant sounds.

Claudio Martini