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A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity
Gary Tomlinson
Gary Tomlinson's *A Million Years of Music* asks one of the deepest questions in the human sciences: where did music come from? Published by Zone Books in 2015, it reaches back long before Homo sapiens, tracing the slow accumulation of capacities - in gesture, toolmaking, social cognition - that eventually made musical behavior possible. Tomlinson, a distinguished musicologist, refuses the easy adaptationist story that music was simply "good for us." Instead he describes a spiraling dance between biology and culture unfolding across deep time, drawing on archaeology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. It is a demanding, genuinely interdisciplinary book, and critics have called it one of the most important contributions to musicology's short history. For readers curious about how humans became musical animals, it is bracing and original.
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The author
Gary Tomlinson is a musicologist at Yale, where he has directed the Whitney Humanities Center. His earlier work ranged across Monteverdi, Renaissance magic, and opera, but here he turns to prehistory, writing in dialogue with the sciences of human origins.
The book
A Million Years of Music narrates the emergence of music not as a sudden invention but as a gradual coalescence, tracking in Neanderthals and early sapiens the capacities that, over the last hundred millennia, combined into modern musical behavior. Its core image is a feedback loop between biology and culture rather than a single evolutionary cause.
How it reads
Reviewers praised its scope and its refusal of tidy answers, though many noted that it demands real effort - it is as much paleoanthropology as musicology. It has been read as a pointed rebuttal to Steven Pinker's dismissal of music as "auditory cheesecake."
For more context
Pair it with Steven Mithen's The Singing Neanderthals for a contrasting account of music's deep past.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Gary Tomlinson
- Publisher
- Zone Books
- Place of publication
- New York
- Year
- 2015
- Edition
- First edition
- ISBN
- 978-1-935408-65-9
- Shelf
- Music
- Location
- Maine
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