&quot;There is no denying it. And while it is true...

"There is no denying it. And while it is true that there are many non-tonal languages as well, we know that the most widespread of these, Austronesian, is recent and must have supplanted many of the languages that had been in place earlier."

Blevins again made a convincing case that Ongan (Andaman islands) and Austronesian are related languages. Neither of them has tones. Some of the younger languages and some of the older languages in Asia have tones. This tells me again that tones flicker in and out of the picture. It's just so simple, Victor.

"So not only music, but language too would have to be understood as somehow magically “evolving” in the same direction at roughly the same time due to some intrinsic, built-in, magical faculty of the human mind."

Linguists don't care about out of Africa or Multiregional one way or another. They work with facts. Linguistic theory, which is built on two hundred years of observing these facts says that phonetic and grammatical similarities are most likely due to convergent evolution. You do seem to be biased in favor of the out of Africa model vs. Multiregional. Out of America is also built on the recognition that certain cultural and genetic "mutations" are homoplasies, and if you want to get to the root of the issue you have to go beyond those.