Protolanguage

The Language Versus Music Debate

Which came first, language or music? Charles Darwin was certain that language derived from music. The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker maintains, to the contrary, that music derived from language. Both language and music are prehistoric behaviors and leave no material trace, so how can one tell? It is known that modern languages were in place prior to the spread of Homo sapiens beyond Africa about 60,000 years ago, because everyone, both inside and out, has a fully developed modern language. And the oldest musical instruments—vulture- and swan-bone flutes—date to 30,000 years ago. But there is every reason to think that both language and music might be much, much older. Homo heidelbergensis (500,000 years ago) already possessed features associated with human speech: a similar vocal tract and hyoid (throat) bone, the human variant of the FOXP2 gene (mutations which cause major deficiencies in language mastery), nerve canals for fine tongue and breath control, and development of Broca's area in the brain, where speech and grammar are processed. Moreover, Homo heidelbergensis lived in social groups, used complex, planned hunting methods, and traded goods over extended distances, so they were subject to strong selective pressures to evolve modes of clear communication. Though suggestive, this evidence is not decisive because these same qualities might have fostered music rather than language. For instance, Broca's area is involved in parsing the syntax of musical strings, song relies on fine tongue and breath control, and deficits in the FOXP2 gene badly affect the processing of rhythm in general, as well as speech.

In any case, this debate so far overlooks a third possibility. It may be that humankinds' hominin forerunners employed a musically inflected mode of expressive vocalizing—something that counts neither as music proper nor as language—that was capable of communicating information in addition to expressing emotion. This is the protolanguage hypothesis: that music and language shared a common ancestor from which both derived. In other words, music was not an offshoot of language and its predecessors and language was not an offshoot of music and its predecessors. Rather, both derive equally from an earlier form of vocalizing that shared many elements in common with them. (To avoid privileging either the musical or linguistic aspects of this progenitor, Steven Brown refers to it as “musilanguage” rather than as “protolanguage.”)

...