Why read The Singing Neanderthals?

Book cover of The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body

Book description

The propensity to make music is the most mysterious, wonderful, and neglected feature of humankind: this is where Steven Mithen began, drawing together strands from archaeology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience--and, of course, musicology--to explain why we are so compelled to make and hear music. But music could not be explained without…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Singing Neanderthals as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Dave Camlin

Author

There are lots of great books about music in human evolution, but this one conjures up such beautiful images and makes such a strong argument that it’s still my favourite.

The human species is over 230,000 years old, and we’ve probably been using singing as a form of social bonding for that whole time, and previous hominid species probably were as well. The book makes the point really well that singing is something we take for granted, but is really quite a remarkable human evolutionary adaptation.

From Dave's list on The best books on how being musical helps us be more human.