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The University High School Band
The History and Theory of Music

Early Man

Cave paintings in Chauvet, France (c. 35,000 BC)

For two million years there had been "human" species, many of them with our unique characteristics like an upright stance, bipedal locomotion, opposable thumbs, and large brains. Anatomically modern humans - our own species, homo sapiens - appeared in Africa around 150,000 years ago. However, there is no evidence that any of these homo species behaved in a distinctly human way.

Then, it seems, something strange happened. Sometime between 75,000 and 25,000 years ago, homo sapiens began to think in a completely different way than any creature that had come before. Not only did humans begin making compound tools, but decorative objects with no practical purpose at all. They began to wear not only animal skins to keep warm, but cosmetic ornaments like beads and necklaces. Ancient caves were decorated with elaborate paintings, they began to bury the dead, and we see at this time the first musical instruments.

This was a difference in kind, and not merely degree. All animals can interact with the environment in a simple stimulus-response pattern. Some very advanced animals can communicate through signal-response, using calls and displays to guide behavior. Neither of these accounts for abstract reasoning or symbolic thinking. Logical reasoning, thinking about meaning, or considering truth and beauty go beyond simply interacting with the environment. (cf. Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy, pg. 85-126.) However, it is this type of thinking that is prerequisite for art, language, literature, religion, mathematics, science, and of course, music.

"If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men and begin to look at beasts and men, then you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that, being so like, they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting than the fact that, having hands, he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material for many camel's-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior one. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with images of gorgeous queens of old? No. The chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals, but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out."

- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908)