"It Don't Mean a Thing if It Ain't Got that Swing"- an Alternative Concept for Understanding the Evolution of Dance and Music in Human Beings.
Level 5 - mechanism / opinion, no new human data
Narrative review and theoretical framework without primary empirical data
PubMed 27774058 · doi:10.3389/fnhum.2016.00485
What was done
The authors reviewed developmental, cognitive, neural, and cross-cultural literature to present an alternative theoretical framework regarding human musical evolution. They examined evidence supporting the hypothesis that rhythm and dance co-evolved as a multimodal perceptual-motor phenomenon before melodic musical features and proto-language.
What was found
The abstract reports no quantitative data or statistical comparisons. Based on existing literature, the authors argue that beat anticipation and rhythm perception are present in newborns, rhythm perception is linked to bodily movement, and young children spontaneously move to rhythm across cultures. They propose multiple evolutionary and adaptive functions for rhythm and dance, including sexual signaling, social bonding, group synchronization, conflict appeasement, ritual trance, motor coordination, pain and mood modulation, and scaffolding neural resources shared with speech.
Why it matters
This framework shifts the evolutionary focus away from melody- and language-first models toward embodied rhythm and movement as the foundational drivers of human musicality.
Limits
The paper presents a theoretical hypothesis rather than new empirical data or a systematic review. Evolutionary claims regarding prehistoric functions are inherently inferential and reliant on indirect developmental and cross-cultural observations.
Cited by
- supports An emerging hypothesis in neuroscience proposes that human communication evolved sequentially through bodily movement, followed by music, and finally speech.