Human survival may have depended on singing
Maybe you don’t consider yourself a singer, but what do you do when you walk into a room and there’s a baby staring at you?
You sing, don’t you? Or at least you soup-up your voice in a sing-songy way and talk baby talk? Turns out this baby talk is universal. All adults do it spontaneously whenever they see a baby. [1]
And some scientists believe that baby talk is the very origin of music.
The evolution of a lullaby
It all started between 6 and 2 million years ago when human ancestors, or hominins, began to walk upright. Bipedalism, as it’s called in the literature, requires narrower hips, making childbirth more difficult.
To complicate matters, brain size was also increasing. Taken together, these two changes in physiology meant that babies were being born earlier and earlier in their development. A big cranium doesn’t fit through a narrow birth canal. Premature babies are helpless and require more maternal care.
During this same time period hominins also lost their hair. Overall, less hair benefitted early humans. It decreased parasites and increased evaporative cooling. But, babies could no longer hang on for a free ride.
Mothers now had to carry their babies, and they still had to forage for food.
It’s much easier to cling to a hairy back of a mother walking on all fours that to hold on to the hairless back of a mother walking upright. ("National Zoo’s gorilla baby is six months old!" by Smithsonian's National Zoo is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
These mothers could really have used a baby sling, but all of these developments—bipedalism, loss of hair, and helpless babies—occurred before clothing technology. Since clothing doesn’t fossilize like bones do, it’s unclear exactly when it became common, but it’s unlikely to have been widespread much earlier than 1.6 million years ago.
So, there was a period of at least a few million years during which bipedal, hairless mothers lacked slings. In order to perform work or even to rest, they simply had to put down or “park” their babies.
If you’re a parent, you likely already know this story. Your baby, when first born, may only weigh as much as a housecat, but even that gets heavy after a while. And what if you have to cook dinner?
“Baby talk appeared for reasons of survival.”
Well, OK, maybe you pick up the phone and order in, but imagine you’re in a group of primitive humans. Your contribution is critical to the group’s survival. You may be caring for an infant, but the group still needs you to do some work. Perhaps that’s butchering a carcass or gathering food. You need both hands to do these tasks.
You put the baby down, and what happens?
She starts crying. So, either you have to pick the baby up and rock her to sleep or you soothe her with your voice. Your baby talk voice! Sing-songy baby talk, or infant directed speech (IDS), appeared for reasons of survival. [2]
Evolution began to select for mothers who had the best ability to most quickly calm their babies and to get critical work done. In time, evolution would also have selected for babies who are especially in tune with the particular sing-songy qualities of IDS.
This explains the fact that melodic qualities of IDS are similar across languages and cultures. It’s truly a universal human behavior. [3]
The melody IS the message
You might argue that baby talk appeared for the purpose of training our babies’ language skills, not to soothe them. It’s easy to imagine that baby talk is just a heightened version of language that gets the baby’s attention and helps him to learn syntax and vocabulary.
This notion is refuted when you consider that we do the same thing to our pets! We use baby talk with our pets, even when we know that animal is incapable of speech. [4] This means that the melody is the message, that, in order to soothe a baby too young to learn language, the words don’t really matter. [5]
All a baby probably needs for reassurance is to hear certain tones constructed in a particular way, and this is something we all do instinctively. If you’ve got a baby, try using gibberish in your baby talk. I bet it’ll have the same effect. Contact me to let me know!
Baby talk became the first songs
Ellen Dissanayake, Affiliate Professor in the School of Music at the University of Washington, makes a compelling argument that, after millions of years of development, the large body of baby talk and lullabies became a rich source for the first musical compositions. This makes sense to me. I can easily imagine an early human, having heard the baby talk from several different mothers in the tribe, begin to experiment and “riff” off of all these musical gestures and fragments. [6]
Voilà! A song is born!
In fact, in one study, the pitch contours of primate IDS were measured, and these musical qualities were found to be similar to the musical qualities of tribal and aboriginal songs from 60 different cultures. The musical kernels of baby talk are present in actual songs. [7]
So next time, you think that maybe you can’t sing, just know that you’re genetically evolved to use a sing-song voice incorporating many of the same qualities that constitute actual singing. In fact, humanity’s survival may have depended on it!
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge my great debt to the wonderfully stimulating book The Singing Neanderthals by Steven Mithen for inspiring this post:
Steven Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals: The Originas of Music, Language, Mind, and Body (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Sources
[1] Inge Cordes, “Melodic Contours as a Connecting Link between Primate Communication and Human Singing,” in Proceedings of the 5th Triennial ESCOM Conference (Hanover: Hanover University of Music and Drama, 2003), 349–52.
[2] Dean Falk, “Prelinguistic Evolution in Early Hominins: Whence Motherese?,” The Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27, no. 4 (August 2004): 491–503; discussion 503-583, https://doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x04000111.
[3] Anne Fernald, “Intonation and Communicative Intent in Mothers’ Speech to Infants: Is the Melody the Message?,” Child Development 60, no. 6 (1989): 1497–1510, https://doi.org/10.2307/1130938.
[4] Denis Burnham, Christine Kitamura, and Ute Vollmer-Conna, “What’s New, Pussycat? On Talking to Babies and Animals,” Science (New York, N.Y.) 296, no. 5572 (May 24, 2002): 1435, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1069587.
[5] Fernald, “Intonation and Communicative Intent in Mothers’ Speech to Infants.”
[6] Ellen Dissanayake, “If Music Is the Food of Love, What about Survival and Reproductive Success?,” Musicae Scientiae SpecialIssue (2008): 169–95, https://doi.org/10.1177/1029864908012001081.
[7] Cordes, “Melodic Contours as a Connecting Link between Primate Communication and Human Singing.”
