Were the caves of Europe once alive with the sound of music? Steven Mithen goes in search of singing Neanderthals

A group of Neanderthals sit outside a cave early one morning about 50,000 years ago. The cave overlooks a river valley that contains scattered birch trees and squawking crows. The ground is covered by a light fall of snow; the river is frozen but the ice will soon thaw as the sky is a brilliant blue. The Neanderthals have to squint through reflected sunlight to watch deer making their way through the trees. They have no need to hunt and enjoy the animals' delicate and graceful movements. One turns to another. He opens his mouth and... And what? Nothing more than single-syllable grunts? Utterances as linguistically complex as our own, composed from Neanderthal words and grammar? Perhaps sequences of words that lack any grammatical structure and hence have an inherent ambiguity as to their meaning. Or something else, something remarkable, something musical?

The issue of Neanderthal language has been debated by palaeoanthropologists ever since the species was discovered in the late 19th century. It is a constant reference point in the debate as to how our own capacity for language evolved from the communication system used by our immediate African forebears who had shared a common ancestor with the Neanderthals about 500,000 years ago - a species known as Homo heidelbergensis .

I suspect that only TV directors of supposed Stone Age "reconstructions" still believe that Neanderthals did little more than grunt at each other. Palaeoanthropologists now recognise that they had all the anatomical requirements for a form of speech as acoustically varied as our own, as did our shared ancestor and earlier forms of hominins. The Neanderthals also had famously large brains, which has persuaded some experts that they must have had language - what else, other than for generating grammatically complex utterances, could all that grey matter and evolved vocal tract have been used for?

³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ

Perhaps singing. But these songs would have been wordless. Made of complex, multisyllabic utterances that drew on variations in melody, pitch and rhythm, they would have formed a type of language quite different from that which we possess today. It may even have excelled at expressing and inducing emotion and building social bonds - the principal functions of the music we are familiar with - while communicating information about the social and natural worlds. This would have been "holistic" rather than a "compositional" form of language, one constructed from a suite of phrases that had relatively fixed meanings rather than by the use of grammar to create a potentially infinite number of utterances from a finite number of words. It would have made extensive use of gesture and body language, onomatopoeia and mimicry of the calls and movements of animals. To us it would have sounded as much like singing as speaking. So too, I contend, would have that of Homo heidelbergensis . And this would have provided the evolutionary foundation for both human music and language today. It seems that song has been an integral part of the make-up of the hominins for hundreds of thousands of years.

The notion that music and language co-evolved from a single communication system reaches back to the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century. The idea was maintained by the linguist Otto Jespersen, who in 1895 claimed that "language began with half-musical unanalysed expressions for individual beings and events". It was largely forgotten in the 20th century and has been entirely neglected in the vast number of books, articles and conferences on the origin of language that have appeared during the past decade - which is possibly why so little progress has been made. But now a whole host of new research from a variety of disciplines points in that direction: music and language co-evolved as part of a single communication system.

³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ

A particularly important contribution has come from linguists who argue that "proto-language" - that spoken by our ancestors - would not have consisted of words (with or without grammar) but of "formulaic" utterances.

This idea, championed by Alison Wray of Cardiff University, meshes with arguments from musicologists who propose that human musicality (another form of holistic communication) must have had a long evolutionary history, rather than being a fortunate spin-off from the origin of language, as Darwinian psychologist Steven Pinker believes. Neuroscientists have found that music and language have some degree of independence in the brain, while developmental psychologists have found that babies are inherently musical - preferring to be sung to rather than spoken to, as every parent knows.

When such evidence and arguments are engaged with those from palaeoanthropology, a new view of our ancestors and the manner in which they communicated becomes apparent. This fresh perspective resolves many of the outstanding problems of the archaeological and fossil records. For instance, while the Neanderthals may have had the necessary anatomy for language, their behaviour firmly indicates that we are dealing with a non-linguistic species - no signs of symbolic thought and cultural stasis throughout the 250,000 years of their existence are apparent. We can now envisage them and their forebears as having a sufficiently sophisticated communication system to have enabled their cultural achievements, including the transmission of complex stone technology and big-game hunting in Ice Age Europe. Moreover, we can at last view them not only as communicative and intelligent, but also as emotional beings using the musicality of their utterances to express the same range of emotions we have today - emotions that were essential to their rational action in the world.

The immediate ancestor of Homo sapiens in Africa, which some refer to as Homo helmei , would have also used a communication system of this type, one that I characterise as Hmmmmm : holistic, multimodal, manipulative, musical and mimetic. Within that African lineage, however, this system split into two elements that we now designate as music and language. The holistic phrases would have become segmented, to use Wray's term, leading to the formation of discrete words that could then be recombined in new ways to produce new meanings. This would have transformed not only the nature of communication but also the nature of the mind, generating a fresh creativity of thought by enabling new combinations of information and ideas - something I term cognitive fluidity. As a consequence, soon after the emergence of Homo sapiens , we find the first traces of art and ritual, new types of tools and then a global diaspora leading to the eventual extinction of all other human species.

³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ

While the possession of language may have been the fundamental key to the evolutionary success of our species, music must be seen as more than the discarded remnants of the Hmmmmm communication system that prevailed throughout most of human evolution. It continues to fulfil many of the same adaptive functions, especially forging and reinforcing group identities, and has taken on new functions that language cannot fulfil, notably communicating with the "gods" that cognitive fluid minds began to imagine as soon as language had evolved.

There is no evidence that the Neanderthals believed in gods, spirits or an afterlife, even though they buried their dead (or at least some of them). When they did so, I suspect they sang to express their grief and to provide comfort for the bereaved. Indeed, I suspect they also sang to their sick and injured as a form of Stone Age therapy - music having been repeatedly shown to have positive healing effects in not only our own society but that of "traditional" peoples. And Neanderthal babies would have also been sung to and rocked rhythmically, much as we do today. It is in the day-to-day musicality of our lives that we can find our closest connection with our now extinct human ancestors and relatives.

So, once again, imagine watching that group of Neanderthals 50,000 years ago. This time, don't only watch but also listen. First, notice their subtle gestures and body language; there is a constant stream of communication whether or not this is accompanied by spoken utterances. When they do speak, don't try to identify any specific words because there aren't any. But if you listen for long enough you may detect repeated phrases, perhaps nuanced by variations in rhythm or pitch. You may hear sounds and see movements that remind you of the deer and crows or perhaps the cracking of ice.

What you are witnessing is an ancient communication system, one used by all human ancestors and relatives at varying levels of complexity. Herein lies both the music and language that we use today.

³ÉÈËVRÊÓƵ

Steven Mithen is professor of early prehistory and head of the School of Human and Environmental Sciences at Reading University. His book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body is published next week by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, ?20.00.