What Singing Lemurs Can Tell Us About the Origin of Music – Mongabay (2025)

Musical Protolanguage Hypothesis, first devised by Charles Darwin, states that in addition to gestures, early humans most probably communicated using musical sounds before developing spoken language. Therefore music can be seen as a prerequisite for language, as an ancestral step to process a linear auditory signal corresponding to a sentence. Darwin noted that birdsong is the nearest analogy to language. However, before birds, perhaps we should pay more attention to our evolutionary relatives (which Darwin would absolutely agree).

The endangered Indri Indri lemurs of Madagascar have evolved a fantastic communication tool consisting of two components: call and song. They have been shown to exhibit rhythmic patterns that are encountered in human music. Lemurs that sing via rhythmic calls may help explain the origin of music. The foundational elements of human music can be traced back to early primate communication.

Of course, there is a difference between language and communication. Human language is a far more complex expression than vocal animal communication – there are grammatical rules and even social conventions. Still, in the animal world, a simple sounding voice could actually be a quite complex prosodic intonation conveying layered data including sex, age, individual identity, territorial claim, and emotional state.

There are many examples for non-human complex communication. For instance, tamarin monkeys employ 38 distinct grammatically structured expressions. Just as we might adopt a local accent for clarity, some Amazonian tamarin monkeys do something similar. Red-handed tamarins appear to have modified their calls to resemble those of pied tamarins, facilitating interspecies communication about territory boundaries. Similarly, marmoset monkeys appear to identify individuals in their group with specific “phee calls”, and converse by taking turns. Marmoset babies also appear to babble just like the human babies. Infant vocal development is accelerated by frequent parental responses to memorable infant sounds. The more often parents respond to their infant’s sounds, the faster the infant’s vocalizations develop.

The motor control of muscles producing sounds is essential for singing and speech. For a while, the FOXP2 gene was thought to be central in Human speech implicated to coordinate neural (brain), mandibular (jaw), laryngeal (vocal cords), and labial (lip) musculature and fueled the debate regarding the cognitive capacity of Neanderthals for the development of articulate speech. Research has suggested that FOXP2 alone cannot be the driver in the evolution of speech which is a product of many genes acting together. The derived FOXP2 variant of modern humans was shared with Neanderthals.

Gradual decline observed in phonemic diversity from 500 languages indicates that the ability to speak has evolved from ancestral populations that lived in Africa.

 

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