model for how our ancestors appreciated their music.Third,ancestral
groups were small,egalitarian,and informal,so none of music’s functions
in military marches,state coronations,national anthems,or other rituals
of our vast hierarchical societies would have been relevant to music’s
evolutionary origins.Why Is Human Music so Different from Acoustic Courtship in Other Species?
This question is a special case of the general quandary:why are humans
so unique,with extralarge brains,intelligence,culture,and creativity?
Three basic answers are available from evolutionary theory.Humans had
different phylogenetic origins from other species,arising from anthro-
poid apes.Human ancestors faced different selection pressures in their
ancestral environment,reflecting the demands of the African savanna
habitat,the hunter-gatherer econiche,group living,and the like.The
random effects of mutation and genetic drift interacted with positive-
feedback processes that amplify these stochastic effects.All of these are
important,but I think the interaction of group living and runaway sexual
selection provide the key.Music is what happens when a smart,group-
living,anthropoid ape stumbles into the evolutionary wonderland of
runaway sexual selection for complex acoustic displays.
Ideally,we need more specific hypotheses linking specific features
of the ancestral environment to specific features of music.One feature
of music is that its attractions work indirectly rather than immediately.
This is a luxury allowed by living in stable social groups.Primates are
highly social,and anthropoid apes have particularly high social intelli-
gence and complex social strategies (Whiten and Byrne 1997).Our
hominid ancestors almost certainly lived in large groups where they
developed complex,long-term relationships with many relatives and
nonrelatives.They would have had lots of time to develop in-depth
assessments of which nonrelatives might make good mates.Rather than
relying on short-term courtship displays as so many nonsocial species do,
hominid courtship could have been a subtle,low-key,long-term affair.
Courtship displays did not have to provoke immediate copulation;they
only had to insinuate themselves into the memory of a sexual prospect,
influencing mating decisions in the months and years to come.
Another feature of music is how exhausting its performance tends to
be in hunter-gatherer tribal societies.People dance a long time and get
really tired doing so.Many anthropologists have observed that human
hunting strategies are rather different from those of other carnivorous
animals,relying on projectile weapons to injure prey,which are then
chased for hours until they drop from injury and exhaustion.This type349 Evolution of Human Music through Sexual Selection