Did Neanderthals hum? A professor brings the question to the Royal Institution
A professor from the University of Reading is coming to Albemarle Street this October to argue that Neanderthals may have hummed before anyone alive today could speak a single word. Steven Mithen, professor of early prehistory at Reading and the author of The Singing Neanderthals, will give a talk at the Royal Institution on 19 October asking whether musicality came before language in human evolution, not after it.
The premise sounds provocative stated baldly, but it rests on a genuinely old academic argument. Mithen’s 2005 book made the case that early hominins communicated through what he termed a “holistic, multimodal, manipulative and musical” system, a kind of proto-language built from tone, rhythm and gesture rather than words, and that this musical layer never disappeared once grammar and vocabulary arrived. It just got buried underneath.
The talk grew out of a much larger project. Mithen appears in For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music, a nine-part docuseries from The Cosmic Shambles Network presented by Charlotte Ritchie, which traces music’s history from the earliest sound waves after the Big Bang through to birdsong, blues and the questions AI is now raising about who or what gets to make music at all. The Royal Institution event lets Mithen take one thread from that much longer story and go further into it than a single documentary episode allows: the deep prehistory of the human ear and voice, and how much of what we recognise as musicality might sit underneath language rather than growing out of it.
The event description poses the question of just how old human music actually is by pointing to instruments dated to around 42,000 years, and asking what came before them. That figure is worth treating carefully. Dating claims for the oldest surviving instruments, most famously a perforated cave bear bone found in Slovenia’s Divje Babe cave, have been contested for decades, partly because Mithen himself has argued that specific object may not be a flute at all but a bone gnawed by a carnivore. The genuinely settled point is narrower and, in some ways, more interesting: whatever instruments have survived from tens of thousands of years ago are almost certainly not the earliest music-making tools that ever existed, only the oldest ones durable enough, and lucky enough, to still be in the ground when someone went looking.
That gap between “oldest surviving” and “oldest existing” is where Mithen’s argument does its real work. If musicality is bound up with how the human brain and vocal tract evolved, rather than being a side effect of technology, then the absence of a 100,000-year-old flute tells us nothing about whether music existed then. It only tells us nothing survived that we can dig up.
The talk runs as both a theatre event and a livestream, a format the Royal Institution uses regularly for its evening talks, letting an in-person audience in Mayfair sit alongside a much larger audience watching from anywhere with an internet connection. Tickets for the theatre run at £16, or £10 concession, with Royal Institution members and patrons paying £7; the livestream is pay-what-you-can. Anyone who registers but misses the 7pm start can watch the recording for two weeks afterwards through the same link.
Book early through the Ri’s own site, since this is exactly the kind of talk EyeOnLondon expects to sell out well before 19 October.
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