Hard As A Rock



The human voice is what we know to be one of the most natural of musical instruments, we are all born capable of making a certain sound to express an emotion, for example when we get hurt or get aggresive we can involuntary shout or cry in an attempt to ease the pain, or if you are a rebellious teenager who sneaks in late at night and youll have noticed you automacilly whisper to avoid being caught by the parents; this same automatic response would have been present in early man. Joseph Jordania suggested that people would get ready for battle or hunting with loud, high energy chants that seemed to lessen the pain of any injury caused during the fight, which  makes sense with a little bit of simple psychology. The "Fight or Flight" response is something that is wired into all of our brains in a part called the hypothalamus, and to keep it as simple as possible, when these primitive people start chanting and the energy builds up in the group, the hypothalamus sends a message to the adrenal glands, which in turn release various chemicals including adrenaline and noradrenaline into the bloodstream, this is when the heart rate starts to increase, you get that "butterflies in the stomach" feeling, the pupils dilate, and you lose the sense of pain, all in all gettin you into "battle mode". So the chanting then would allow the people to get into the "battle mode" much earlier making them more efficient at fighting. Jordania also said that the voice could have been used to warn of danger, by making a humming sound to alert fellow members that there is something big and ugly near and they don't want to disturb it, just like the teenagers of today not wanting to wake there parents.

Another way early people could use there voice could be used for mating as Charles Darwin suggests, he says that men would  make the best and biggest sounds they could in order to impress a female, but I think there is problems with this because he suggests that it's the men that would do the showing off and then the females would then choose which man they wanted, but that would mean that females wouldn't have learnt to sing when we all know that women are more than capable of singing and have sang along with men as part of groups for a long time.

Just for entertainment purposes i've added a little video of what the discovery of music could be like.