holes were reportedly chipped from the femur of a bear cub (Kunej and
Turk,this volume).According to Fink (1997),the distance between the
second and third of four visible holes (two complete holes and two
partial holes) is twice that between the third and fourth holes,which
would be consistent with whole steps and half steps in a diatonic scale
(but see Kunej and Turk,this volume,for an alternative view).Finally,
one historical tidbit that links music to infants portrays Babylonian
and Assyrian lullabies from the first millennium b.c.as incantations or
magical formulas for soothing babies (Farber 1990).In sum,the conver-
gence of empirical findings from our laboratory with cross-cultural evi-
dence and with the admittedly speculative historical record makes an
intriguing case for the biological basis of at least some musical princi-
ples.Such converging perspectives offer encouragement for further
empirical study of infants in the search for universals,or bottom-up prin-
ciples,of musical processing and form.Acknowledgments
Research reported in this chapter was funded by grants from the Natural
Sciences and Engineering Research Council and the Social Sciences and
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