New research on music predating speech

This is slightly off topic, but interesting nonetheless. Anthropologists in England (Cambridge
University) are looking into the very real possibility that "cavemen", as the radio programme
reported, used pitches and rhythm to communicate , vocally and instrumentally, before the
constructs of human speech had been established. I'm sorry that I don't have any references to
the researchers as I gleaned this from a half -listened -to breakfast radio report by the
BBC. Some sort of early instruments with definite piches had been discovered and this led to
the research.
I just thought that this might provide some relief for the list regulars in speculating what
kind of scales early humanoids might haveused. Now wouldn't it screw things up for all of us
if they found evidence of the use of 12-tet?

> Alison Monteith wrote:
> http://www.egroups.com/message/tuning/12837
>
> Anthropologists in England (Cambridge University) are looking
> into the very real possibility that "cavemen", as the radio
> programme reported, used pitches and rhythm to communicate,
> vocally and instrumentally, before the constructs of human
> speech had been established.

Hi Alison. It's very interesting that you should post this
today... Jonathan Szanto was visiting with me today, and we
were talking about the long period during which archaeologists
say people were physically modern (i.e., able to speak) but
unable to write anything down. I've posted on this recently;
it was the period approximately 45,000 to 5,000 years ago.

I had the thought that perhaps the reason no-one thought
of inventing writing was that maybe music played such an
effective role in aiding memory (history would be formulated
into long poetic epics, etc.) that that was sufficient.

Just another topic that merits further research... and an
interesting coincidence, considering your post.

-monz
http://www.ixpres.com/interval/monzo/homepage.html