Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammals
Order: Primates
Family: Hominidae
Genus: Homo
Conservation status: Not listed
For the story of Orpheus is of the truth.
Christopher Smart
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, women are changed into spiders and laurel trees, men into stags and anemones. But you only have to look at your feet to see a transformation almost as strange. Where most primates have a respectable pair of grasping rear hands we have two changelings: long arched pads with rounded chins at one end and stumpy thumbs straight-jacketed to baby fingers at the other.
Human hands are among the most wonderful parts of the body: sensitive, flexible and supremely able. They can build whole worlds – even if, as is the case with the character Linus in the cartoon Peanuts, they have jelly on them.
Observing possums – marsupials which last shared a common ancestor with primates more than 50 million years ago – the zoologist Jonathan Kingdon speculates that fine manipulative skills may have emerged very early in the mammalian line. He writes:
when I watched possums expertly finger-drumming bark to locate larval burrows or manoeuvring witchetty grubs out of holes and into mouths, I suspect that I was witness to some of the most ancient skills that distinguish not just possums but, maybe, archaic mammals as a whole. Touching, gauging, gouging, probing hands and fingers are so closely coordinated with smelling, seeing, hearing, and tasting that their refinements have as much to do with serving senses and feeding appetites as with clambering through branches. If, as most evolutionary biologists would contend, human anatomical history is made up of successive increments, perhaps we need look no further than our hands to discover a legacy that could stretch back 140 million years.
But feet? Feet resemble hands that have been squeezed and warped by the cruel binder of evolution into ‘plates of meat’ (as Cockney rhyming slang has it). Unlike those of our ape relatives, they’re quite incapable of getting a decent grip on a branch and good for nothing much, it seems, except stomping around on. (This is not just a result of being horned into shoes: the feet of someone who has lived without shoes are tough and calloused but for all that look surprisingly like those of someone who has worn shoes all his or her life.)
But take a different line of approach and human feet start to look like a marvel. The comedian Billy Connolly once said that Scotland’s contribution to world history was staggering. Well, it is feet, Scottish or otherwise, that make staggering possible. And even without the aid of whisky, humans can perform some of the most delightful dances on them of any biped except perhaps the Blue-footed Booby (a frabjous bird that lives on the Galapagos Islands). Our feet – along with the other adaptations that make us at ease on two legs – enable us to walk enormous distances without strain and, in the right conditions, outpace even the fleetest quadrupeds. No other ape or monkey comes close. For our nearest cousins, chimpanzees and gorillas, walking a few paces on two feet takes as much effort as it does for us to run around on all fours.
Is it absurd to say that going around on two feet is what makes humans unique? According to an often-told story, the ancient Greek cynic Diogenes certainly thought so. When Plato defined man as a ‘featherless biped’, Diogenes presented him with a plucked chicken and said, ‘Here is your “Man”.’ Plato hastily amended his definition to ‘featherless biped with broad nails’. It’s easy to imagine Diogenes laughing at that too, but add one more qualifier to Plato’s definition – an erect back – and it starts to look almost sensible. Idealized as Leonardo’s Vitruvian man – straight-backed with limbs spread across square and circle, his legs exactly half his total height, and two paces equal to that height – upright man is Hamlet’s ‘paragon of animals’, a comparator against which other worldly beings have often been portrayed as comic or sinister distortions.
The debate as to what distinguishes humans from other animals dates back at least two and a half thousand years. Some religious traditions speak of an invisible essence in every individual: a human soul. But there has also been no shortage of attempts to define us by externally observable traits and behaviours. Man is, variously, a political animal (Aristotle); a laughing animal (Thomas Willis); a tool-making animal (Benjamin Franklin); a religious animal (Edmund Burke); and a cooking animal (James Boswell, anticipating Claude Lévi-Strauss and Richard Wrangham). Man has also, at one time or another, been defined as an animal which is able to reason and form opinions, an animal which carries a stick, a philosophical animal, a deceiving animal, a story-telling animal and the only animal that likes hot chili sauce. Humans, observes the poet Brian Christian, appear to be the only animals anxious about what makes them unique.
Research in recent decades has shown that many behaviours and capabilities once thought to be unique to humans – tool-use, theory of mind, culture, morality, personality – are present to at least some degree in other species. We do, however, continue to claim such things as art, religion, cooking, sport and – arguably – humour as uniquely ours. (These, incidentally, make a good starter list of the things that people care most about – apart from sex and affection, which animals also crave.) There may also be mileage in defining us by negatives. The cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, for example, claims that ‘much of what makes us human is not an ability to do more things, but an ability to inhibit automatic responses in favor of reasoned ones . . . we may be the only species that engages in delayed gratification and impulse control’.
Which brings us to what is often said to be the most obvious thing that make us unique: a big, complex brain and, arising from it, language. But, this chapter will argue, our big brains wouldn’t exist without our big feet. And language wouldn’t exist without one of our profoundest, most enigmatic and (perhaps) oldest of art forms – music. In answer to the question posed above, going around on two feet is not what makes us human, but unless our ancestors had started to do so, we would never have become human.
As bipeds go, humans are very much the new kids on the block. The world’s first terrestrial two-leggers were probably proto-dinosaurs that evolved about 230 million years ago. One of the earliest known has been given the wonderful name Eoraptor lunesis – the Dawn Hunter from the Valley of the Moon. (It was an early predator, and its fossils were discovered in a valley in Argentina named for the Moon.) For about 165 million years afterwards little got in the way of the descendants of Eoraptor and other dinosaurs, until a brick wall otherwise known as the Cretacious–Tertiary extinction event. Ever since, bipedalism has been a minority pursuit among reptiles. One of the very few lizards that does it today is the Plumed basilisk, a real animal from Central America that shares a crown-like crest with its mythological namesake. Moving like a super-charged Charlie Chaplin, the basilisk can run for quite some distance on two feet on the surface of a lake or river, with the consequence that it’s known locally as the Jesus Christ lizard. But even the basilisk prefers a quiet life on all fours.
Birds, which are of course direct descendants of dinosaurs, walk on two feet. But for the great majority of them, it is just one of the ways they get around. Flightless birds that have thrived often have other unusual abilities. Penguins, for example, are superb swimmers. Away from the ocean, birds such as ostriches have evolved exceptional size and ground speed, but only exist today on sufferance from humans. The great majority of other flightless birds have gone the way of the Dodo. The most successful survivor today is the chicken (the closest living relative, as it happens, of Tyrannosaurus rex). There are upwards of twenty-four billion of them on the planet at any one time but they thrive only because they have been enslaved and engineered by humans.
Few mammals are exclusively bipedal, and those that are – such as the Kangaroo mouse of North America and the true kangaroos and wallabies of Australasia (a group of animals known, gratifyingly, as macropods, which means ‘big feet’) – have a very different way of walking from us. In what is known technically as bipedal ricochet gait, they deploy both legs simultaneously as giant springs: a kangaroo is a marsupial pogo stick. Bears, monkeys, apes and a few other animals can walk on two legs, but they tend to do so only for short distances and with a limited range of movement.
Just when and why our progenitors started walking around on two legs most of the time is not known. Footprints preserved in fossilized mud at Laetoli in Tanzania show that about 3.7 million years ago Australopithecines of the species known as ‘Lucy’ were walking, upright, on feet quite like ours and in a way quite like ours. For all that, the differences between ‘Lucy’ and ourselves are striking. She had longer arms and shorter legs than we do in proportion to her size (adults were slim, and about 1.3 metres, or four foot, tall) and, of course, a much smaller skull, containing a brain about a third the size of that of a modern human. Watching ‘Lucy’ walk – with her short legs, long arms, and head and face at least as reminiscent of chimpanzees as humans, yet moving with such a human-like gait quite unlike the waddle of a chimp – would be fascinating, perhaps uncanny.
‘Lucy’ may have been adapted both for living in the trees and travelling some distance on the ground, and this versatility would have enabled her species to persist for almost a million years even as climates and environments changed. But another hominin – and the first member of our genus – appears to have been adapted to living full-time on the ground: Homo habilis first turns up in the fossil record about 2.3 million years ago and thrived for about 900,000 years. Habilis means ‘handy’, a name given to the species after the first discovery of fossils in the 1960s: it was thought they had been the first species to make stone tools. Certainly, habilis was a dextrous tool-maker. He also differed from ‘Lucy’ in having longer legs and narrower hips. These, and other anatomical innovations, would have made walking and running less effortful and more efficient (although not efficient enough to prevent habilis from often being lunch for the sabre-toothed cat Dinofelis). And these differences were further accentuated in the larger brained Homo ergaster and successor species such as erectus and heidelbergensis, whose limbs and trunk were proportioned very like those of modern humans.
Early humans liked to eat meat. The protein and energy it provided helped feed their growing bodies and large brains. But meat has a habit of running away from you when it’s alive or being eaten by somebody larger and more powerful than you when it’s already dead. So what to do? According to the endurance-running hypothesis, early humans evolved a new way to compete on the African savannah: the ability to run long distances, often in the hot sun. In this way, cooperating in small groups, humans could either chase quadrupeds to exhaustion or get quickly to the carcasses of fresh kills left by other animals retiring to the shade in the heat of the day. For many hundreds of thousands of years before the development of effective spears and other distance weapons, argues this hypothesis, man thrived, and learned to think, because (he) was born to run.
Several uniquely evolved features of human physiology and morphology are cited in support of this idea. Notably, the large tendons in our legs store energy like springs when we run, improving the efficiency of gait by more than 100 per cent. (Earlier species such as ‘Lucy’ may have had Achilles and other tendons, but their legs were shorter and much less powerful.) We also have an effective cooling system in the sweat glands spread widely over our bodies. Each gluteus on our bottom is so maximus because this helps us to run well, balancing us rather as a tail does in the case of every other running biped and contracting to prevent our bodies from falling forwards as each foot strikes the ground. Other features (on a list of about twenty-six) include short toes that do not get in the way and the nuchal ligament which stabilizes the head when it is in rapid motion.
It’s also argued that running is central to what keeps us most human and healthy – that in running, humans experience funktionslust, the joy of doing what we are designed to do. Animals are naturally proficient at, and tend to enjoy, doing things important for their survival, and so it is (or was) with running for humans. It has also been suggested that running and tracking animals stimulated the evolution of many of the mental processes that make science possible. Whatever the truth of that, for more than 99 per cent of human history near-constant movement has been our lot. As Marshall Sahlins put it, ‘the first and decisive contingency of hunter gathering is continual movement’. Hugh Brody writes of the nomadic peoples of western Canada: ‘everything about [them] points towards a readiness to change and to move . . . a resolute indifference to any accumulation of [material] wealth’.
But there is more to being human than running around and sticking sharp objects into things we want to eat or people we don’t like. Whatever the cynics may say, we have a vastly greater capacity to communicate and cooperate – at least with those in our own group – than any other primate. Human language – which allows us to make an almost limitless number of propositional statements about the world, and greatly facilitates recall of the past and anticipation of the future – is central to making this possible. But language is extremely complex. How did it arise, and why? Why would we have wanted to speak in the first place? The answer, say some evolutionary psychologists, is that over the last few million years our ancestors evolved a particular talent and a desire for ‘deep intersubjectivity’ (which roughly translates out of jargon as ‘knowing each other very well’); we developed an enhanced capacity for ‘mind-reading’ (that is, understanding what is going on in the minds of others without having to ask them), underpinned by empathy (shared feelings) and sympathy (shared goals). All these qualities, which confer collective advantage on the group, would have been enhanced by the acquisition of language. But none of them would have developed as they did and language itself would not have become possible had they not been preceded by and evolved from earlier ways of communicating. And it’s here, goes one line of argument, that something very like music played an essential role. Music and dance share an origin with language. Not only that, they remain crucial to human wellbeing.
Such at least is the case made by the anthropologist Steven Mithen, who says that early humans would have found advantage in using their increasingly flexible voices as a part of a system of communication he calls ‘hmmmmm’ (one h and five m’s): holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic. All these forms of expression, Mithen points out, are observed in other primates, but separately; only early humans combined them to create something more complex and sophisticated than anything found among non-humans. Relying as it did on gesture, facial expression and other signals as well as sounds, ‘hmmmmm’ was neither music nor language, but it was music-like. Only comparatively recently – perhaps as little as 100,000 years ago in a genus that had already been around for the best part of two million years – did music and language take entirely separate paths. By that time, the capacity of music-like sounds to elicit shared emotions and cooperation was deeply entrenched in the foundation of our being. We are, in the phrase of the psychologist Colin Trevarthen, ‘born with a kind of musical wisdom and appetite’.
Explanations like this are not universally accepted. In the 1990s the linguist Steven Pinker famously described music as ‘auditory cheesecake’, implying that it was an accidental by-product of evolution that humans now use to tickle their fancy but that it had no adaptational significance. Certainly, music has long been seen as an anomaly. Back in 1870 Charles Darwin wrote that ‘as neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed’. Darwin concluded that music is a form of sexual display, like a peacock’s tail. As we would put it today, the rock star always gets the girl, or boy.
But it’s also pretty clear that ‘cheesecake’ and sex are not the whole story. In every human society music and dance exist in other contexts, and serve other purposes such as rites of passage, spiritual and religious practices, mourning and expressions of solidarity and of sheer collective joy. For virtually all humans except those with certain neurological disorders or genetic abnormalities, music and dance provide substantial, non-frivolous benefits. They are above all social activities that enable us to interact and bond by facilitating coordinated movements such as working and marching together. (The phenomenon is known as ‘entrainment’.) Music and dance also benefit the individual, manipulating mood and physiology more effectively than words alone can to excite, energize or calm us. Mother-song to baby, and the musical babble of a baby to its parents, are where we begin, and a channel of some of the most powerful emotions of which we are capable. And, as Oliver Sacks and others have documented, music can act on the brain in subtle, deep ways, helping sometimes even to restore speech and movement for those who have lost them. All this suggests that music is not only essential to our present nature but has deep roots in the human past.
Few other animals show much ability to produce or imitate a variety of regular rhythmical and musical patterns, and those that do tend to arouse especial affection in us. This is most obviously the case in songbirds but it has also become true of whales since we first began to hear their songs less than half a century ago. The apparent musicality of some pets is also beguiling. Christopher Smart believed his cat Jeoffrey could ‘tread all measures upon the musick’. A dancing cockatoo called Snowball has wowed half the world via the Internet with his ability to dance in time to the Back Street Boys.
Our closest cousins, the other great apes, have very limited musical and linguistic abilities. And the origin of this difference between us and them may originate in the habit of walking on two feet. Fully upright walking and running require the spinal chord to join the brain case from directly below rather than from behind. This arrangement leaves less space between the spinal cord and the mouth for the larynx, the muscular valve that seals the lungs while we swallow food. As a result, the larynx is positioned lower in the throat, which has the incidental effect of lengthening the vocal tract and increasing the diversity of sounds it can produce. Early humans were, as a consequence, capable of a greater range of sounds than, for example, chimpanzees can manage. (It looks as if the human vocal tract had already evolved into something very close to its modern form by half a million years ago.) Bipedalism also freed us from a rigid link between stride and breath. Most of us can walk and talk (and even chew gum) at the same time – something that other apes cannot do because of the forces pressing through their frames as they move. Also, human walkers and runners can adopt different stride/breath ratios. A runner, for example, may choose four steps to one breath, three to one, five to two, two to one, three to two, or one to one, with two to one being the most common. The net result: mastery of rhythm, song and speech (and, incidentally, our species’ characteristic laugh). ‘Poetry’, said George Seferis, ‘has its roots in human breath.’
Sometimes, the music of one human culture is almost unrecognizable as music by people from another who have not heard it before. On occasion people have disputed that there is a single thing that can be called music. That said, every culture makes something like music and there are some essential similarities. Just about every culture bases their musical scales around the octave, for example, and most also use the perfect fifth (although there is at least one that does not use octaves, and there are some that omit fifths). But looking for similarities in form and content may be something of a wild goose chase. The more important point is what musics do rather than what they are.
The Babenzele, a Pygmy tribe in the Congo, combine polyphony (voices singing different melodic lines simultaneously) and polyrhythm (beating more than one rhythm at the same time; for the Babenzele, it may typically be eight, three, nine and twelve beat sections combined in a complex overlapping whole). Many Westerners find this kind of music hard to follow and appreciate. But this initial bewilderment can soon be overcome. A good place to start, says the anthropologist Jerome Lewis, is to listen first to the forest where the Babenzele live. Various animals – monkeys, songbirds and others – make different sounds at different times; combined, these are the sounds of the forest. For the Babenzele, polyphony and polyrhythm are ways of echoing and embodying their world, of learning its secrets. ‘What they are really interested in’, says Lewis, ‘are synergies: technologies of enchantment, where you lose your sense of self and become aware of a greater community.’ When the human voices intertwine just right, he says, a sense of calm euphoria arises, ‘a blissful state in which you have forgotten yourself completely and are lost in the beauty of sound’.
People have long been puzzled how it is that music, though not representational in the way that language is, ‘speaks’ so directly to us. ‘How is it’, asked Aristotle, ‘that rhythms and melodies, although only sound, resemble states of the soul?’ Part of the answer may be as follows. As we have seen, music depends on essential aspects of our physiology and physical being in the world – heartbeat, breath, pace, emotion, cognition and more. But it also, as the music of the Babenzele reminds us, depends on the attention we pay to phenomena such as forest sounds beyond our own immediate physical bodies and those of our immediate human group. Music brings the two together in ways that enhance (or entrain) our sense of vitality and will. It enlarges consciousness as individual identity is both made more vivid and at the same time absorbed, however temporarily, into something quite other than itself.
It has been suggested that consciousness exists because it is evolutionarily adaptive: the (mostly) marvellous experience of being aware strongly motivates us to want to continue and invest in what we love. Whether or not this suggestion is right (and it has been vehemently challenged), music is surely an innovation that enhances consciousness and commitment to life. Experimentation with rhythm, dynamics, harmony and timbre is a way of exploring and expanding the nature and boundaries of consciousness itself.
We are, then, a musical animal – or, to be more precise, an erect, musical, featherless running biped . . . sometimes given to staggering. Music is a channel for essential aspects of our existence, if not a source of it. But there remains the question of what we do with these capacities. And on this matter, consider Orpheus.
As the tale goes, Orpheus makes such beautiful music that the birds and beasts are enchanted, the trees and rocks dance, and even rivers change course in order to get closer to him. But then his beloved wife Eurydice is bitten by a snake and dies. Orpheus, inconsolable, sings so sadly that the gods and nymphs of the upper world weep. At their suggestion he travels down to Hades, where he begs the king and queen of the dead to restore his love to life. Never before have the rulers of the underworld been moved by the pleas of a mortal man, but Orpheus’s music softens their hearts and they agree to allow Eurydice to return with him to life on condition that he walk in front and not look back until both reach the upper world. Orpheus sets off, with Eurydice following. As soon as he reaches the upper world he turns to look, forgetting that she too needs to have reached the top of the path from Hades for the pledge to be fulfilled. Eurydice vanishes for ever and Orpheus is left alone.
A pretty tale to be sure, but what use is it? In what sense is it, as Christopher Smart wrote, ‘of the truth’? Myths are not merely about messages and meanings. Still, here are three to hazard. The first – which I have already outlined and is in any case so obvious that it hardly needs stating – is that music can be one of the most astounding forces in life: so powerful that, in the heightened states of emotion to which it takes us, it can seem to bring us close to overcoming death itself. Music emanating from the non-human world – not least the songs of great whales – overturns a long-established self-centredness (rather as did the first photographs of the Earth taken from space), suggesting the possibility of profound changes and expansion of human consciousness.
A second ‘message’ in the story of Orpheus is a warning. At the critical moment Orpheus fails to exercise self-control and as a result loses what he most loves. The lesson, then, is that we should sometimes restrain our impulses even when this is the hardest thing in the world to do. Another mythical traveller to Hades learns a similar lesson. Odysseus is warned twice, once by the shade of the prophet Tiresias, a second time by the nymph Circe, to resist the temptation to steal and eat the cattle of the Sun. Odysseus, ‘a man endowed with the gods’ own wisdom’, manages to resist but is unable to control his companions, and they – good men who have come with him through many trials – are lost to disaster.
A third take on the Orpheus myth is ‘never look back’. But this is, I think, wrong. The point is not that we should forget the past, but rather that we should know when and how to look back. Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return, as expressed in Zarathustra, is often also interpreted wrongly. It does not mean that we should be endlessly repeating the past. Rather it means we should will – in the sense of fully inhabiting and being at peace with – all that has made us what we most essentially are, including our evolutionary origins and our kinship with other animals.
It follows that we should embrace our human ancestors much more fully than we often do. This doesn’t mean getting romantic or sentimental about the Stone Age; enthusing about the ‘paleo-terrific’ has on occasion led people in some strange directions. It does mean more fully imagining the lives and worlds of genus Homo.
The scientist and writer Jared Diamond has written dismissively about humans before the advent of ‘behavioural modernity’, the great leap in technological and cultural achievement that took place over the last few tens of thousands of years. How much can you say, he asks, about a creature whose stone tools were ‘only marginally more sophisticated’ than the sticks chimpanzees use to extract termites from their nests, tools which progressed ‘at an infinitely slow rate, from extremely crude to very crude’? Until about forty thousand years ago, Diamond says, we were ‘just another species of big mammal’ – and not necessarily the most impressive: ‘still much less widespread than lions’.
This view lacks imagination. Better, the approach taken by the sculptor Emily Young:
For hundreds of thousands of years we have made stone tools: people sitting together under the trees, chipping and tapping and knapping their flint, their obsidian, their jasper. And their multiple rhythms, together with the sound of cicadas, and birdsong, would have been musical.
The earliest peoples did not live on the harshest margins of the world as do a few surviving groups of Bushmen, Australian aboriginals and Inuit today. Rather, as Jonathan Kingdon has pointed out, they lived where other life forms were often abundant to an extent that we would find incredible today. If we listen hard we may catch hints of their ‘music’ every day in a hundred little unremembered acts. And if we can – on the basis of sound evidence, carefully interpreted – better imagine the details and qualities of this deep past, allowing voice to those who are long since mute, then the life we do know and can imagine for the future is sure to become a little more astounding. Our ancient ability to walk and run huge distances in virtually every terrestrial environment and our music, song and dance will have carried us there.
