No matter what language you speak, music compels you to get up and move.
Or so it’s been thought. Some cultures, it now appears, may lose their groove, forgetting how to dance and even sing lullabies to their children.
That’s the main finding from new research carried out by anthropologists Manvir Singh, from the University of California, Davis, and Kim Hill, from Arizona State University, which was based on a decade of study on a Northern Aché tribe in Paraguay.
In all that time, no singing was seen directed at infants, and no dances were observed. It’s apparently not something the Northern Aché know how to do – and that challenges most previous research on the topic.
“Dance and infant-related song are widely considered universal, a view that has been supported by cross-cultural research, including my own,” says Singh. “And this conclusion, in turn, informs evolutionary theorizing about music’s origins.”
What singing there was mostly happened when people were alone, the researchers found. Women tended to sing about loved ones who had passed away, while the songs of men (who sang more frequently) were primarily about hunting.
The researchers have a couple of hypotheses explaining what’s happened. The concepts of dancing and singing to young children may have been lost during times when the Northern Aché population dropped, or when they were settled on reservations.
According to conversations with the nomadic hunter-gatherers, other behaviors – including the ability to make fire, the use of magic rituals in hunting, and polygyny – have been lost to time in the same ways.
“It’s not that the Northern Aché don’t have any need for lullabies,” says Singh. “Aché parents still calm fussy infants. They use playful speech, funny faces, smiling and giggling.”
“Given that lullabies have been shown to soothe infants, Aché parents would presumably find them useful.”
It’s also notable that the Southern Aché tribe closely linked to the study group do have dancing and group singing. It’s possible that their northern relatives did practice these behaviors, once upon a time.
While this study only covers a single group of people, it seems that lullabies and dancing may not be innate for human beings. Compare that to something like smiling, which everyone does, and which doesn’t need to be learned.
Getting clarity on what we do and don’t do naturally, without any input from anyone else, is important in understanding the evolution of our species – and the ways in which we’ve gained an advantage over other animals.
However, the researchers aren’t rushing to any firm conclusions from their years studying the Northern Aché. It’ll be interesting to see if anthropologists discover any more communities who never think of dancing or singing lullabies.
“This doesn’t refute the possibility that humans have genetically evolved adaptations for dancing and responding to lullabies,” says Singh.
“It does mean, however, that cultural transmission matters much more for maintaining those behaviors than many researchers, including myself, have suspected.”
The research has been published in Current Biology.
