Popular Science Review - The Singing Neanderthals

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Review - The Singing Neanderthals - Steven Mithen

The cover of this book puts across a confusing message - it is neither about neaderthals (at least in the main), nor is it about chimpanzees. It's about the origins of music and its relationship to language. And a touch of that confusion pervades the book. It has a fascinating subject, and all the material you'd want is there, but as with Steven Mithen's book on life in early post-ice age societies After the Ice, it's too long and it could do with a better structure.

The year 2005, when this book was published, found us awash with books on the origins of human traits - it's particularly instructive to read this book in conjunction with Robbins Burling's The Talking Ape, which gives a better context for the origins of language, and seems more plausible in the few places where it disagrees with Mithen's book. Burling does refer to music, and the way it may have prefigured language, but Mithen does us a real service in concentrating on music, and ably showing that Steven Pinker was way off track in How the Mind Works, when he says effectively that music has no real evolutionary significance and is just a bit of throw-away fun.

All sorts of details intrigue here. The way that babies seem to have perfect pitch, the differences and overlaps between music and speech in the brain, the way that music is interlocked with emotion - there's no doubt at all that there elements of a truly great book in here... it's just struggling to get out from unstructured bloat.

Sometimes the excess is irrelevancy - far too much text, for instance, is spent on hand axes, apparently because it's one of the author's specialities. (Relevance to music? Erm, not a lot.) At other times it suffers from excessive cuteness - Mithen repeatedly refers to his thesis as "Hmmmmm" - a tedious and folksy acronym that he is clearly embarrassed by, as he always puts it in quotes. Oh, and it's a real shame he seems not to have heard of the ideas in Clive Bramhall's The Eternal Child , which would answer a number of puzzles about early human developments much better than anything suggested here.

Overall message - go out and buy this book. It is worth fighting through it to get the message about what music is and where it came from. But we find hard to sing its praises as much as we should, because it could have been so much better.

Only in hardback

Reviewed by Brian Clegg

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