lind-peinture » Other » The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body

eBook The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body ePub

by Steven Mithen

Author: Steven Mithen
Language: English
ISBN: 0674021924
ISBN13: 978-0674021921
Publisher: Harvard University Press; 1st edition (March 31, 2006)
Pages: 384
Category: Humanities
Subcategory: Other
Rating: 4.6
Votes: 220
Formats: lit lrf rtf lrf
ePub file: 1333 kb
Fb2 file: 1679 kb

Download ePub Download Fb2

Steven Mithen begins his task with a detailed analysis of music and musical ability, drawing on musicology, psychology and . Faced with difficulties of such daunting scope, Steven Mithen remains undaunted

Steven Mithen begins his task with a detailed analysis of music and musical ability, drawing on musicology, psychology and neurobiology to build a comprehensive and erudite picture of music's capacity to move u. .This is a long-overdue book, which approaches human evolution from an intriguing as well as entertaining angle. I. M. Dunbar, Times Literary Supplement. Faced with difficulties of such daunting scope, Steven Mithen remains undaunted.

In The Singing Neanderthals, Mithen introduces us to the science that might support such popular notions. Thus Mithen arrived at the wildly ambitious project that unfolds in this book: an exploration of music as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species.

PDF On Jan 1, 2005, Steven J. Mithen and others published The singing Neanderthals: The origins of music . All content in this area was uploaded by Steven Mithen on Apr 15, 2014.

All content in this area was uploaded by Steven Mithen on Apr 15, 2014.

In THE SINGING NEANDERTHALS, Steven Mithen redresses the balance, drawing on a huge range of sources, from neurological case studies through child psychology and the communication systems of non-human primates to the latest paleoarchaeological evidence. The result is a fascinating and provocative work and a succinct riposte to those, like Steven Pinker, who have dismissed music as a functionless and unimportant evolutionary byproduct. Попередній перегляд книги . Відгуки відвідувачів - Написати рецензію. Рецензія користувача - vguy - LibraryThing.

The Singing Neanderthals book. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read

The Singing Neanderthals book. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read.

Steven Mithen is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading. He has written a number of books, including The Singing Neanderthals and The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. Mithen received a BA in prehistory and archaeology from Sheffield University, a MSc degree in biological computation from York University and a PhD in archaeology from Cambridge University.

In The Singing Neanderthal, Steven Mithen redresses the balance, drawing on a huge range of sources, from .

In The Singing Neanderthal, Steven Mithen redresses the balance, drawing on a huge range of sources, from neurological case studies, through child psychology and the communication systems of non-human primates to the latest paleoarchaeological evidence. The result is a fascinating and provocative work, and a succinct riposte to those, like Steven Pinker, who have dismissed music as a functionless and unimportant evolutionary byproduct.

evolution of the human mind, body, and society

book by Steven Mithen. evolution of the human mind, body, and society. As one who thoroughly enjoyed this book, I can validate what Mithen says above. He does examine a large array of data and proposals from many others and critically analyzes this information.

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 addressing language, and could not be accounted for without understanding the evolution of the human body and mind. Thus Mithen arrived at the wildly ambitious project that unfolds in this book: an exploration of music as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species.

Music is the language of emotion, common wisdom tells us. In The Singing Neanderthals, Mithen introduces us to the science that might support such popular notions. With equal parts scientific rigor and charm, he marshals current evidence about social organization, tool and weapon technologies, hunting and scavenging strategies, habits and brain capacity of all our hominid ancestors, from australopithecines to Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals to Homo sapiens--and comes up with a scenario for a shared musical and linguistic heritage. Along the way he weaves a tapestry of cognitive and expressive worlds--alive with vocalized sound, communal mimicry, sexual display, and rhythmic movement--of various species.

The result is a fascinating work--and a succinct riposte to those, like Steven Pinker, who have dismissed music as a functionless evolutionary byproduct.

Sat

From a layman just out for a good read.

I spend a lot of my free time actively listening to music. I have a large vinyl record and CD collection acquired since my childhood and I take pride in keeping it well maintain. I only watch an average of 10-12 hour of television per month. So alternatively I listen to music, all kinds of music. I also love to read a lot of non-fiction and have over the past year become interested in paleo-anthropology and our human and societal evolution. While searching "neanderthal" on Amazon I came across this book and obviously I found the title appealing. Wow, this book was incredible! It covers human development from our ancient hominid ancestors and proposes a theory of how they communicated along with the evolution of music and language. I found it extremely interesting. It was also one of the most "fun" reads I've ever experienced. I'll never look at human behavior and communication the same. I can see so much more meaning in various human activities which I previously took for granted and I see the shadows of our ancient ancestors everywhere. Thank you Steven Mithen.

Uanabimo

I enjoyed reading Mithen's thesis about Neanderthal vocalizations. But in light of recent discoveries about the Neanderthal hyoid bone, we now know that Neanderthals likely had the same speech capabilities as humans. In addition, Neanderthal symbolic representations have come to light, indicating that they were probably cognitively very similar to humans. Still, a good read, but everything about Neanderthals must be re-evaluated in light of recent scientific and anthropological studies about them.

Fearlessdweller

A personal idiosyncrasy of mine, which you may be able to relate to if you are reading this book's reviews, is that I have a deep longing to understand, to be able to picture and imagine and relate to, our ancient human ancestors and cousins - to be able to vicariously experience their world, and for that world to be cohesive and plausible. This goes beyond intellectual curiosity or any academic interest. It is a longing for connectedness to, and realization of, bygone worlds.

The Singing Neanderthals is one of those rare books (and I've read many!) that meaningfully furthers such a quest of envisioning and truly understanding ancient life. During the page-turning hours in which I devoured this book, I was privileged to live in the worlds of our hominid ancestors and cousins. However, these insights also lead to a deeper understanding of one’s own humanity – one’s wiring, instincts, and human experience.
All that said, The Singing Neanderthals did not consist merely of musings and imaginings. From a scholarly standpoint, the model(s) presented for the development of language and music, as well as their supporting arguments and research, were very sound.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in understanding, appreciating, or learning more about human origins, language, music, and why we are the way we are today.

GoodLike

The author explains connections of language development to music abilities development. He relates human body development to human mind development. He shows individual growth of a baby and its parents within context of homo sapiens growth. The author understands what archeological excavations meanss, he can interpret rules of language and rules of art expression alltogether within one system, i.e., within human cultural system. Nothing is static here, everything is in move.

One of the main topics I took form the book was author's way of discussing Chomsky's generative grammar. For longer time already I was suspicious about Chomsky's universal rules distributed by genetics and this book gave me arguments against it.

I disaggreed sometimes but still the book provoked my own thinking. I had started to read it because I wanted to know something about origins of art within humankind development but it gave me much more.

The book is written in very readable manner and the author shows respect to all whom he criticizes.

Last not least - I like the book title very much. Could you imagine a Neanderthal standing at the top of a hill singing Song of Joy?

Meztihn

An interesting discussion on the origins of music from an evolutionary perspective with contributions from the fields of archaeology, anthropology, psychology along with a bit of of neuroscience thrown in, along with some discussion of the origin and development of language.

Much is speculation and at times one has the impression that the author sees his own speculation as not being all that speculative (e.g. even his main argument that Neanderthals are music-using but not language-using animals is, I believe, still open to debate - as is his statement that music emerged after language evolved). Furthermore some of his assumed truths (such as genetic proof that there was no interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans) appear to me to be more a matter of belief than fact.

In all as other reviewers have indicated and in detail described, a work worth reading and well-referenced.