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200‣ Nonsense syllables of ancient origins (actually, any nonsense-syllables) arevirtually completely absent in Khevsureti songs;‣ Poetry in Khevsureti is extremely developed, with no signs of the ancient nonrhythmicforms of poetry. Khevsurs are in fact considered to be the best poetsamong Georgians.In contrast, Svanetian traditional music shows the archaic character by all thesefactors: (1) there is a strong syncretic integrity of singing and dancing, (2) round dancesare extremely widely distributed, (3) antiphon forms of singing are almost the only formof singing; (4) ancient nonsense-syllables are very widely used (sometimes showingpromising parallels with the dead ancient languages of the Mesopotamia) and (5) there isno modern rhythmic poetry in Svaneti. We should also add here that, unlike Svanetians,who still speak their language, Khevsurs speak the Georgian language, although thecharacter of geographic names from Khevsureti suggests that populations of this regionspoke North Caucasian languages. Also unlike Svanetians, who still live in their familytowers built in the 8 th -12 th centuries, according to Georgian historical sources, theKhevsurs must have come to the mountainous area of their contemporary residenceduring 17 th -18 th centuries. Therefore, if we look at the musical traditions of the Khevsursfrom the point of view of the “secondary archaic” it becomes possible to view the simplecharacter of Khevsureti two-part singing not as the actual “beginnings of Georgianpolyphony”, but as the result of the loss of more complex forms of polyphony.Khevsureti is not the only region in Georgia where we have the case of thegradual disappearance of more advanced forms of traditional polyphony. Meskheti insouthern Georgia is another case. Here the last examples of traditional polyphony wererecorded in the 1960s by Valerian Magradze from the only two surviving old singers(Magradze, 1986). By 1982, when I conducted a fieldwork in Meskheti, onlymonophonic versions of polyphonic songs were found. Saingilo is still another regionwith a Georgian population (in the territory of Azerbaijan) where the tradition ofpolyphonic singing is absent, although during my fieldwork in this region in 1987 Imanaged to record the detailed description of the polyphonic singing tradition that wasstill around in the 1950s (Jordania, 1988b).Are these cases of losing the traditions of vocal polyphony unique to Georgia?This is the crucial question we are going to discuss in the next case, dedicated not to anyparticular tradition of vocal polyphony, but to the general historical dynamics of theappearance/disappearance of vocal polyphony.Case Study #2Historical Dynamics:Appearance or Disappearance?Just a week after his 26 th birthday, while resting in a forest, Charles Darwinexperienced a major earthquake that struck Chile on 20 th February of 1835. Walking afew days after the earthquake on the beach, Charles noticed that some mollusks thatalways live on the rocks under the water, were now on the rocks well above the water