ABSTRACT

It has become common to explore connections between human evolution and aesthetic and artistic behaviors against the background of a certain framework. The biological approach to aesthetic and art behaviors can be variously motivated. The model of evolutionary explanation adopted is often plainly supposed to be of the classical kind: individuals are the units of selection and the method of intergenerational transmission is genetic. Beginning about 400 kya, Homo heidelbergensis, the progenitor species for the Neanderthals and later for us, lavished special attention on a small minority of the bifacial hand axes they produced. Artifactual evidence of aesthetic behavior is scarce also for our species following its first emergence about 195 kya. According to evolutionary psychologists, our aesthetic sense was shaped by biological drivers (Orians 2014). A music-specific theory is defended by Ian Cross, who argues that music's evolutionary function is to assist cognitive development.