© 2015 Gary Tomlinson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tomlinson, Gary.
A Million years of music : the emergence of human
modernity / by Gary Tomlinson. — First edition.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-935408-65-9
1. Music — History and criticism. 2. Musicology.
i. Title. ii. Title: A million years of music.
ml160.t635 2015
780.9’01 — dc23
2014024072

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 Ack nowledgments

Many students and colleagues witnessed the development of this

book. Four students whose involvement merits special mention
are Abigail Fine, Roger Grant, Thomas Pooley, and Gavin Stein-
go. Among my former music colleagues at Penn and present ones
at Yale, Jeffrey Kallberg, Emma Dillon, Brian Kane, and Ellen
Rosand all listened, responded, and lifted me at many moments.
Colleagues too numerous to name at these and other universities
from Cape Town to Oslo to Berkeley heard parts of this work,
encouraging, challenging, doubting, always engaging. I would
like to thank them all.
An early stage of the project took the form of the Wort Lec-
tures at the University of Cambridge in 2009. I am grateful to
Roger Parker for the invitation to deliver them, and to several
interlocutors I met there: Ian Cross, Graeme Lawson, Iain Morley,
and Elizabeth Blake. Elizabeth provided me with my first lesson
in flint-knapping, and she might like to know that I have worked
to refine the techniques to which she introduced me — though she
would be the first to suspect that I still cannot boast anything
approaching Neandertal expertise.
Other personal contacts with humanists from several fields,
with anthropologists and archaeologists and with evolution-
ary, cognitive, and other scientists, have exercised a formative
influence on my ideas. They include (in approximate order of
their interventions) Stuart Kauffman, Manuel de Landa, Daniel
Lord Smail, Robert Seyfarth, Paul Kockelman, Sally McBrearty,

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jamshed Bharucha, Robert Shulman, Terrence Deacon, Rich-

ard Prum, Michael Silverstein, Aniruddh Patel, Günter Wagner,
Paul Griffiths, Peter Godfrey-Smith, and Stephen Stearns. I am
indebted also to Kim Sterelny and Clive Gamble for sharing with
me their work in prepublication form, and to the late María Rosa
Menocal for welcoming me to Yale by inviting me to offer a semi-
nar at the Whitney Humanities Center in which some of these
ideas were elaborated.
Ingrid Monson and Carolyn Abbate both read the manuscript
through, the first offering many helpful suggestions, the second
page-by-page advice of the sort all writers cherish. The book and
I each profited immensely from these readings. The encourage-
ment and suggestions of Zone editor Ramona Naddaff and the
expertise of director Meighan Gale and designer Julie Fry have
also been invaluable. Professor Nicholas Conard, the archaeolo-
gist in charge of Germany’s most stunning Paleolithic excavations
over the last decade and more, graciously supplied the photo-
graphs for the Plates. Virge Kask skillfully drew the other images
and diagrams.
Portions of Chapters 1 and 5 revise some sections from my
essay “Evolutionary Studies in the Humanities: The Case of
Music,” Critical Inquiry 39 (Summer 2013); I am grateful for the
editors’ permission to reuse this material. An earlier version of
Chapter 2 appeared as “Before Homo sapiens: Toward a Deep His-
tory of Entrainment,” in Musical Implications: Essays in Honor of
Eugene Narmour, ed. Lawrence F. Bernstein and Alexander Rozin
(Pendragon Press, 2013); I am likewise grateful to Pendragon.
Margreta de Grazia and Colin Thubron have long been the
most generous of friends and interlocutors, sustaining me,
motivating me by example, even rescuing me twice when Lon-
don’s airports shut down. Joseph Kerman talked with me across
decades about these matters and many others while collabo-
rating on other projects; he is sorely missed. As I delved ever
deeper into the riches of evolutionary theory, my children David,
Laura, and Julia, blossoming humanists all, kept me (the lapsing

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

humanist) honest regarding the decisive force of human culture;

Laura in particular urged a view of culture extending beyond
the human. They appreciate, I know, how proud their father is
to be disciplined by them in his enthusiasms — and how much joy
and wonderment he gains from watching their own enthusiasms
proliferate — and I hope they will find humanism redeemed in a
certain way in the final product. My stepson Raymond is a bit
young to have thus corrected me, but one correction he would
offer, were he to read these notes, would be to include in them
our philosophical greyhound Boss.
As to my brilliant and beloved wife, Juliet Fleming, most of
what might be said defeats the conventions of acknowledgment,
so let this suffice: Whatever this book is, it would have amounted
to much less without her.

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