Department of Anthropology

Group defense of territories is found in many gregarious mammalian carnivores, including lions, canids, and hyenas. In these taxa, group members often mark territory boundaries and direct aggressive behavior towards alien conspecifics found within the territory. Middle Pleistocene hominins occupied an ecological niche similar to such large carnivores, and so could be expected to share with them a suite of behavioral traits. Complex, coordinated vocalizations that function, at least in part, to advertise the group defense of a territory is one behavioral trait exhibited by several social carnivores, as well as many other gregarious animals, including primates. We propose that the evolution of human music and dance was rooted in such coordinated auditory and visual territorial advertisements. Human proto-music, in essence, might have been functionally analogous to the howling of wolves.