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Ivan Hewett explores the origins and evolution of music. |
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This picture gallery relates to Radio 3's Sunday Feature broadcast of 9 December 2007 The urge to make music is rooted deep in human nature. But why that urge arose in the first place is a hotly debated question, which divides the scientific community. Is music a useless by-product of evolution, as renowned cognitive scientist Steven Pinker says? Or is it a vitally important faculty that helped humanity to flourish, as archeologist Steven Mithen and many others believe? Ivan Hewett goes in search of the answer, drawing on a fascinating body of evidence that ranges from Paleolithic cave settlements and observations of apes making music, to laboratory studies of infants’ musical abilities, and a new brain-scanning experiment to map the neural basis of the music faculty.   1/3Ivan Hewett in the cave at Hohle Fels in the Swabian Jura region of Germany, where the world's earliest flutes have been found. |
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