ABSTRACT
All human societies have music. As far as we know, they have always had. Unlike other widespread human systems such as writing, music was not invented by some groups and then spread to others. Instead, music seems to have emerged spontaneously in all forms of human societies. Moreover, this emergence is not recent in human evolution. Music apparently emerged as early as 40,000 to 80,000 years ago, as suggested by the recent discovery of a bone flute attributed to the Neanderthals (Turk, Dirjec, & Kavur, 1996). Thus, music is not only ubiquitous in human societies, it is also old in evolutionary terms. The development of music may well pertain more to human biology than human culture. As such, music may be subserved by dedicated neural networks 1 that evolved specifically for the processing of music.
