Music Helped Connect Hunter-Gatherer Groups in Central Africa

[Judi Lynn]

How did music shape language? For hunter-gatherers in Central Africa, music may have worked as a social network.

By Paul Smaglik
May 29, 2024 3:30 PMMay 29, 2024 3:32 PM

Social networks existed long before Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. But how they formed in ancient times has sometimes stymied scientists. Now, a study in Nature Human Behaviour demonstrates that music played an important role in connecting different hunter-gatherer groups in Central Africa.

Central Africa provides a rich trove of history for anthropologists to plumb. Hunter-gatherers have lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. But finding the cultural connectivity that has developed between communities over that time period is challenging, in part because modernization sometimes squelches older ties.

How Hunter-Gatherers Learned Language

For instance, scientists suspect that hunter-gathers in the Congo Basin absorbed languages from their farming neighbors, the Bantu. As a result, it’s difficult to tease apart aspects of culture formed from those fairly recent agricultural interactions versus ties from long-term meetings among communities spread throughout the region.

To do just that, a team led by Andrea Migliano from the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Zurich (UZH), gathered genetic data from 10 Central African hunter-gatherer groups. Then they divided that DNA into segments based on genetic time signatures. Those segments included the periods before, during, and after they encountered the Bantu

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https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/music-helped-connect-hunter-gatherer-groups-in-central-africa