If gradualism is an empirical issue,the same is certainly true of its off-
spring,continuism.Continuism holds that evolutionary development
must be a direct continuation of some trait found in an ancestral species.
For example,continuists hold that language must have developed
directly out of an early system of primate communication (Hockett and
Ascher 1964) with some kind of warning calls developing into words (for
the implausibility of such notions,see Bickerton 1990,chapter 1).But
again,biomusicology may do well to keep an open mind on this score.
Until I heard the stunning presentation by François-Bernard Mâche (this
volume),I would probably have said,by analogy with language,that
music was unlikely to be in any sense a continuation of nonhuman song
or any other form of behavior.After I heard Mâche’s recordings of a vast
range of different traditions in human music,each one accompanied
by an eerily similar effect produced by an avian,mammalian,or even
amphibian species,I was not so sure.If anyone could produce such a
performance with linguistic material,I would be tempted to convert to
continuism overnight.But again,caution is in order,and one should ask
to what extent music,especially music uninfluenced by the dominant
culture,may exploit the repertoires of other species to achieve its effect.
What all this suggests is that one among many avenues of research
open to biomusicology is a comparison of music and language (see
Brown,this volume).At the very least,such a line of inquiry would
greatly increase our understanding of the similarities and differences
between the two.At best,it might yield insights into the evolution of
both.
But mention of the relationship between music and language brings
us to the final hurdle that students of any aspect of human evolution
should face.The way the behavioral sciences are structured,discussed
earlier in this chapter,encourages,even forces,students of the evolution
of a human capacity to focus exclusively on that capacity instead of
seeing its acquisition as part of a much larger and more complex process.
The rather ugly and cumbersome word for the whole process by which
the human species developed is:“hominization.”This is a process that
includes acquisition of language,of music,of mathematics,of logic,of
self-consciousness:all those traits that either have no equivalent in other
species or that are developed to a degree unknown in other species.It
would be bizarre to suppose that all of these capacities developed
autonomously and independently,without constantly influencing one
another.It would also be bizarre to suppose that each of these capaci-
ties had a separate and independent birth.
The time that has elapsed since the hominid line split from the rest of
the primates is nowadays estimated as less than six million years
(Campbell 1988). For any one of these unique or quasi-unique161 Biomusicology and Language Evolution Studies