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"The evidence of the fossil record is, as I say, that the control of voice and respiration needed for singing apparently came into being long before they would ever have been required by language."

"Ultimately music is the communication of emotion, the most fundamental form of communication, which in phylogeny, as well as ontogeny, came and comes first. Neurological research strongly supports the assumption that 'our love of music reflects the ancestral ability of our mammalian brain to transmit and receive basic emotional sounds,' the prosody and rhythmic motion that emerge intuitively from entrainment of the body in emotional expression: 'music was built upon the communications through vocal intonations.' Presumably such 'mechanisms' were highly important for group survival. They were also likely to have deep roots: 'the deeply emotional stirrings generated by music,' writes the influential anthropologist Robin Dunbar, 'suggests to me that music has very ancient origins, long predating the evolution of language.'"

"But if it should turn out that music leads to language, rather than language to music, it helps us understand for the first time the otherwise baffling historical fact that poetry evolved before prose. Prose was at first known as pezos logos, literally 'pedestrian, or walking, logos,' as opposed to the usual dancing logos of poetry. In fact early poetry was sung: so the evolution of literary skill progresses, if that is the correct word, from right-hemisphere music (words that are sung), to right-hemisphere language (the metaphorical language of poetry), to left-hemisphere language (the referential language of prose).
Music is likely to be the ancestor of language and it arose largely in the right hemisphere, where one would expect a means of communication with others, promoting social cohesion, to arise."

The Master and His Emissary (2019), pp. 102, 103, 105
Ian McGilchrist

NoeticJuice

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