approximately 750-cm^3 brain of KNM-ER 1,470 was little more than half
the size of the average human brain.
Together, these findings suggest that left-hemisphere-dominant,
humanlike language may have begunto evolve by two million years ago.
If so,right hemisphere-dominant music was probably also beginning to
evolve.This is not the full story,however.As detailed above,findings
from PET and fMRI experiments point to prefrontal cortex and the cere-
bellum as important foci for both semantic linguistic and musical tasks.
Evidence shows that these two regions do not appear as fully developed
in two middle Pleistocene endocasts from archaic Homo sapiensfrom
Africa and Greece,although they have modern-size brains and are dated
to only several hundred thousand years ago (Seidler et al. 1997).
Although the jury is still out on the exact relationship of these fossils to
living people,it appears that language and music areas may not have
been fully humanlike in at least some hominids by that relatively recent
time.Slow and progressive changes are documented for vocal commu-
nication in another highly intelligent mammal,the humpback whale
(Payne,this volume),and the evolution of writing in humans also seems
to have been prolonged (Falk 1992a).The fossil record has not yet
revealed exactly when language or music became fully developed.At the
moment,however,it is reasonable to hypothesize that they began evolv-
ing together (Finlay and Darlington 1995) by two million years ago,and
that their subsequent evolution may have been long and progressive.Acknowledgments
I am deeply grateful to Steven Brown,François-Bernard Mâche,Björn
Merker,and Nils Wallin for planning the wonderful first Florentine
Workshop in Biomusicology that inspired this volume.Julian Keenan
and John Redmond are thanked for lively discussions and their help with
acquiring library materials.References
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