If the original Out-of-Africa group moved uniformly all the way from Africa down the coast of south Asia to the Malay Peninsula and from there down through Indonesia to New Guinea and Australia, as is sometimes claimed, then we musicologists have a problem. While many indigenous groups along the “beachcomber” route sing and play in a manner strongly reminiscent of P/B style, there has to my knowledge never been any instance of such a style found anywhere in Australia. I have never heard of panpipes there either. In fact the musical style of the Australian aborigines is dramatically different from the types of music under discussion thus far.
Considering the importance of Australia as the bearer of the earliest archaeological evidence of modern humans outside of Africa, evidence which so strongly supports the southern route model, the absence of any trace of the "African signature" in any of its native music definitely requires an explanation. If the Out of Africa migrants were singing and playing in some version of P/B style, as I feel sure they were, then what could have happened when they got to Australia that made them lose their musical traditions and develop such different ones? And since we do in fact find many instances of the African signature in New Guinea (and Island Melanesia as well), its absence in Australia is just one more mystery we can add to all the others.*
I would like to propose an explanation that might resolve all or most of the contradictions in one stroke, which again, like so much else I've been discussing on this blog, should be seen as exploratory, speculative and provisional. It may not be the correct solution, or maybe only partly correct, but it can at least help to focus our thinking.
Let's first examine some possibly significant clues:
1. Fossil bones of modern humans have been found near Mungo Lake in Australia, originally dated to ca 60,000 ya, but now thought to be no more than 45,000 years old. "Mungo Man" appears to be the oldest modern human remains to be found outside of Africa. However, the most complete skeleton found "was of a gracile individual, which contrasts with the morphology of modern indigenous Australians." So-called "robust" skeletons of a very different type than Mungo have also been found, but they are much more recent, dating to ca 10,000 ya.
2. There is reason to believe that Pygmies lived in Australia until very recently. This is not the "urban myth" some might think, but was studied and documented by a highly respected anthropologist, Joseph Birdsell:
3. There are also Pygmies in New Guinea, e.g. the Eipo people, whose males average 146 centimeters in height (or 4.79 feet). The music of the Eipo bears the "African signature," in the form of vocal hocket, with some instances of yodel.
4. Certain tribal peoples in southern India have been characterized as having a relatively "robust," "Australoid" morphology, strongly resembling that of the Australian aborigines. For this reason, it has long been thought that there could be a relation between the two groups -- and since the advent of the Out of Africa model, there has been speculation that the Australians might be descended from Africans who developed an "Australoid" physiognomy in India. Some recent genetic studies have claimed to support such a theory, at least in part, though the results may be inconclusive.
(to be continued . . .)
*We could, of course, assume that only a very small group were the first to land on the Australian shore, a group too small, and perhaps also too young, to properly sustain so group-oriented, interactive and complex a practice as P/B; in which case the resulting population bottleneck could have produced a cultural founder effect that could in turn have led to a drastic loss and/or simplification of traditional musical practices. Unfortunately a scenario of that kind, while it might account for the musical anomaly, leaves too many other questions unanswered, especially the question of how and when New Guinea was populated, and why we see no sign of the influence of New Guinea culture (rituals, languages, music, etc.) in Australia despite the fact that the two land masses were joined until only about 10,000 years ago.
"Considering the importance of Australia as the bearer of the earliest archaeological evidence of modern humans outside of Africa, evidence which so strongly supports the southern route model, the absence of any trace of the "African signature" in any of its native music definitely requires an explanation."
ReplyDeleteI see the problem in a slightly different light. If Australian music was one of a kind, with no close similarities with any other tradition, then you could attribute it, quite convincingly to a bottleneck effect. A small group of migrants broke off from a main camp and developed a whole new musical style in isolation.
However, Australian music has close parallels in Papua New Guinea and North America. It's only "anomalous", and as such requires a special explanation, because it has nothing to do with P/B. Otherwise it's very normal because it covers a very wide "Eastern" or "Circumpacific" area?
So could you consider as puzzling the fact that there are two traditions, rather than one, that seem to be "very old" because attested in Australia AND Papua New Guinea where we have one of the earliest human remains.
"We could, of course, assume that only a very small group were the first to land on the Australian shore, a group too small, and perhaps also too young, to properly sustain so group-oriented, interactive and complex a practice as P/B."
I would be careful about assuming that group cohesiveness can only be expressed through P/B style. Australian aborigines are intensely social, as attested by their very intricate kinship systems (moieties, submoieties, clans, etc.) You could say, I guess, that since Pygmies and Bushmen don't make intricate social distinctions, they are more "group-oriented" (Victor Turner's "communitas") but the whole issue will be ip for debate.
German: "If Australian music was one of a kind, with no close similarities with any other tradition, then you could attribute it, quite convincingly to a bottleneck effect. A small group of migrants broke off from a main camp and developed a whole new musical style in isolation.
ReplyDeleteHowever, Australian music has close parallels in Papua New Guinea and North America. It's only "anomalous", and as such requires a special explanation, because it has nothing to do with P/B. Otherwise it's very normal because it covers a very wide "Eastern" or "Circumpacific" area?"
You make an excellent point. If "A small group of migrants broke off from a main camp and developed a whole new musical style in isolation" then it does seem quite a coincidence that such a similar style can now be found in parts of New Guinea and most of N. America (parts of S. America as well).
However, if you read carefully you'll see that this is not my final interpretation of what happened, but only the consideration of one possibility. The theory I'll be coming up with does in fact account for the instances of a similar style in New Guinea, for which there is substantiating evidence. The connection with North America is more problematic, because it's much harder to find extra-musical evidence for any link between Australia and N. America that also excludes everything in between. That's as true for an OOAm perspective as an OOAf perspective. Nevertheless, I do take this connection seriously and am always on the lookout for genetic evidence that could support it. As of now, I don't see any. Which means that we always have to consider the possibility of convergent evolution in this case, that cannot as of yet be ruled out. Nevertheless your point is well taken. You are learning to think like me, German. ;-)
"I would be careful about assuming that group cohesiveness can only be expressed through P/B style. Australian aborigines are intensely social,"
Yes, you're right. All I was saying was that a very small group of young people might not have been in a position to maintain a highly group-oriented tradition, such as P/B. But the same would be true if their original tradition had been Australian, and in fact moreso, because if we include song texts and social context into the musical mix, then Australian music is considerably more complex and sophisticated than P/B, no question.
"I do take this connection seriously and am always on the lookout for genetic evidence that could support it. As of now, I don't see any."
ReplyDeleteHmm... What about the distribution of Y-DNA haplogroup C: one branch in North America (C3b), another in Australia (C4). This is not an exclusive North American-Australian connection but it doesn't have to be. The important thing is that it's very specific. On the mtDNA end, haplogroup S, which is found at high frequencies in Australia, is part of macrohaplogroup N, which in term pops up in North America in the form of haplogroups A and X. Just like Y-DNA haplogroup C, X isn't found in South America, A is more frequent in North America and has its highest frequencies among the Na-Dene (who also have Y-DNA C3b at the highest frequencies). Again, there's something very specific here, although macrohaplogroup N is not restricted to North America and Australia of course. Your musical evidence can possibly tied to these genetic signatures with a further hypothesis that other instances of the same vocally tense musical style got lost from or evolved into something else in Northeast and Southeast Asia. Had this style survived more broadly in Asia, we would have had an even better parallel with the distribution of the Y-DNA and mtDNA lineages.
What I find fascinating (and correct me if I am wrong) is that this vocally tense style is the exact opposite of vocal interlock because an ensemble simply can't sing polyphonically if everybody's voices are tense.
"All I was saying was that a very small group of young people might not have been in a position to maintain a highly group-oriented tradition, such as P/B."
ReplyDeleteI had another thought on this. Different cultures segment the continuum between human and non-human (animal and spiritual) differently. Cohesion within the human group (older and younger, male and female participate in joint activities) may correlate with the clear separation between humans and animals (including animals spirits) as well with the living and the dead. Alternatively, disunity within a human group (men and women sing separately, women are not allowed to look at men's musical instruments, older people are segregated from younger people, etc.) may be accompanied by a closer alignment between these groups and some animal spirits or the spirits of the dead. Among the Kutenai Indians in North America every ritual song is supposed to represent a category of animal spirit and a singer is supposed to be the voice of this spirit.
Tense vocalizing, therefore, may imply that the culture partitions the human-nonhuman continuum differently from the way cultures with vocal interlock do it.
See McLeod, Ethnomusicological Research and Anthropology (1974) on the Kutenai example. This article also has references to the studies that see a functional connection between music and tonal languages in Southeast Asia (e.g., List, Speech melody and song melody in central Thailand // Ethnomusicology 1961 5 (1)).
The rest of thinking is mine and it's based on an array of sources on the nature of sociality in American Indian tribes.