Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, Inuyama, Aichi 484-8506, Japan.
Phys Life Rev. 2009 Mar;6(1):11-22. doi: 10.1016/j.plrev.2008.08.003. Epub 2008 Sep 12.
According to Darwin [Darwin, CR. The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. London: John Murray; 1871], the human musical faculty 'must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed'. Music is a human cultural universal that serves no obvious adaptive purpose, making its evolution a puzzle for evolutionary biologists. This review examines Darwin's hypothesis of similarities between language and music indicating a shared evolutionary history. In particular, the fact that both are human universals, have phrase structure, and entail learning and cultural transmission, suggests that any theory of the evolution of language will have implications for the evolution of music, and vice versa. The argument starts by describing variable predispositional musical capabilities and the ontogeny of prosodic communication in human infants and young children, presenting comparative data regarding communication systems commonly present in living nonhuman primate species. Like language, the human music faculty is based on a suite of abilities, some of which are shared with other primates and some of which appear to be uniquely human. Each of these subcomponents may have a different evolutionary history, and should be discussed separately. After briefly considering possible functions of human music for language acquisition, the review ends by discussing the phylogenetic history of music. It concludes that many strands of evidence support Darwin's hypothesis of an intermediate stage of human evolutionary history, characterized by a communication system that resembled music more closely than language, but was identical to neither. This pre-linguistic system, which could probably referred to as "prosodic protolanguage", provided a precursor for both modern language and music.
根据达尔文（Darwin，CR。人类的起源和性选择。伦敦：约翰·默里；1871 年）的说法，人类的音乐才能“必须被列为他所拥有的最神秘的才能之一”。音乐是人类文化的普遍现象，没有明显的适应目的，这使得它的进化成为进化生物学家的一个难题。这篇综述审查了达尔文关于语言和音乐之间相似性的假设，表明它们具有共同的进化历史。特别是，两者都是人类的普遍现象，具有韵律结构，并且需要学习和文化传承，这表明任何关于语言进化的理论都将对音乐的进化产生影响，反之亦然。该论证首先描述了可变的音乐能力倾向和人类婴儿和幼儿韵律交际的个体发生，提出了关于在现存非人类灵长类物种中普遍存在的交际系统的比较数据。像语言一样，人类的音乐能力基于一系列能力，其中一些与其他灵长类动物共有，而另一些则似乎是人类独有的。这些子成分中的每一个都可能有不同的进化历史，应该分别讨论。在简要考虑人类音乐对语言习得的可能功能后，综述以音乐的系统发育历史结束。它的结论是，许多证据都支持达尔文的假设，即人类进化历史中有一个中间阶段，其特征是一种交际系统与音乐更相似，而与语言则不相同。这个类似于语言的前语言系统可能被称为“韵律原语言”，为现代语言和音乐提供了前身。
