Let’s rewind the clock. And I’m not talking about heading back a few centuries—I mean really rewinding, back to when the wheel was a high-tech innovation and fire was the height of luxury. Long before humans had the words to argue about maths versus music in schools, they had something far more unive
rsal: rhythm, sound, and song.
In fact, some anthropologists suggest that music predates human language itself. Let that sink in for a moment. Before we could even string together a coherent sentence, we were already creating music. And not just random grunts and claps—actual, structured, meaningful sound. As Steven Mithen, a professor of archaeology, explains in his book The Singing Neanderthals, early humans likely communicated using a form of “musical protolanguage”—a combination of gestures, rhythm, and melody. Mithen argues that this kind of communication was crucial for survival, allowing humans to bond, coordinate, and express emotions long before they developed words.
Songlines: The World’s Oldest Curriculum?
Take the example of songlines, a tradition among the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. These ancient musical pathways are not just songs—they’re stories, maps, and histories all rolled into one. As Bruce Chatwin beautifully describes in his book The Songlines, these musical routes criss-cross the Australian landscape, with each song marking a specific geographical feature. To walk the land, following a songline, was to navigate using melody rather than maps.
According to anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose, songlines are essential to Aboriginal identity and survival, teaching not only how to travel across vast, harsh terrains but also how to live in harmony with the natural world. Every rock, river, and tree had a corresponding note, a rhythm, a verse. In a way, these songs were the original curriculum—teaching survival, geography, history, and culture through music.
Now, imagine sitting in a meeting with today’s education policy makers, trying to explain the value of such a system. “So, these songs literally help people navigate the world…” The response? “Sure, but can we measure it in an Ofsted report?”
Clearly, humans have understood the importance of music for tens of thousands of years. Music wasn’t just entertainment, or a “nice-to-have” subject. It was essential. It connected people to their world, their ancestors, and each other. And somewhere along the way, in our race to quantify, measure, and tick the right boxes, we seem to have forgotten that.
Music as a Precursor to Language
But this idea that music was central to human development isn’t just tied to Australian songlines. Across the globe, there’s evidence that music and rhythm played a crucial role in how early humans communicated and socialised. Linguist Steven Pinker famously referred to music as "auditory cheesecake"—a delightful but unnecessary by-product of evolution. But not everyone agrees.
Anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake, for example, argues that music is not just an evolutionary by-product, but a fundamental part of what makes us human. She suggests that early humans used musical behaviour to bond with one another—particularly between mothers and infants. If you think about it, mothers instinctively use sing-song voices, rhythm, and lullabies to calm their babies. It’s a universal behaviour, suggesting that music was crucial for nurturing emotional connections long before humans had language.
A study by Thomas Geissmann, published in Folia Primatologica, even found that some of our closest primate relatives, like gibbons, use song-like calls to communicate over long distances. This points to the idea that early humans, too, likely used rhythm and melody to communicate before words came into play.
The Power of Rhythm and Melody
Consider this: even today, music has the ability to communicate emotions far more effectively than words alone. In a piece of research published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2013, scientists discovered that babies as young as a few months old respond to the emotional content of music—reacting to major keys with happiness and minor keys with sadness. We’re hardwired, it seems, to respond to music on an emotional level. It’s not just about hearing sound—it’s about feeling it.
In prehistoric times, this ability to connect emotionally through music could have been a matter of life or death. Rhythm, in particular, is thought to have played a key role in early human cooperation. The coordinated drumming or clapping of a group would have helped to synchronise movements during hunting, gathering, or even warfare. It was a way to bring people together, to get them moving in unison, working as one. As Mithen points out, rhythm is essentially “the heartbeat of collective action.”
Music: The Original Survival Skill
And it wasn’t just about communication or coordination. There’s evidence that music was used in rituals and ceremonies—events that bound early communities together. From the rhythmic chants of tribal societies to the drum circles of indigenous cultures, music played a key role in the social and spiritual lives of humans for millennia.
The work of archaeologist Iain Morley, in his book The Prehistory of Music, suggests that musical instruments date back at least 40,000 years, with flutes made from bird bones and mammoth tusks being some of the oldest ever discovered. These instruments weren’t just tools for entertainment—they were central to rituals, likely used to invoke deities or mark significant life events, such as births, deaths, or the changing of seasons.
And this is where the importance of music truly shines through. It wasn’t just a “subject” that could be dropped from the curriculum in favour of something more “useful” (like how to construct a shelter out of mammoth fur). Music was essential to community, to identity, to survival itself.
From prehistoric humans using rhythm to communicate, to Aboriginal peoples mapping out their world with songlines, to early mothers singing to their babies, music has always been integral to human life. It wasn’t just a form of entertainment—it was a tool for survival, expression, and education.
And now, thousands of years later, music has become one of the first things to be cut from the school curriculum. In our rush to focus on “core” subjects, we’ve forgotten that music was once at the core of everything we did.
So, the next time someone suggests cutting music from the curriculum, just remind them: if it weren’t for music, we might still be grunting at each other in caves, trying to figure out the best way to avoid a sabre-toothed tiger.
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