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207With the convincing and well-documented example of the late development ofEuropean professional polyphony from monophonic singing, for the educated Europeansthe late emergence of polyphony from monophony for all human cultures was as naturalas the idea of drinking and absorption of milk for all humanity. Of course, in case of milkabsorption scholars found out that Europeans were in fact the only major population onthe planet who can drink milk without any complications, so the humanitarian aidprograms correspondingly had to adjust their policy of providing thousands of tons ofmilk powder to the starving populations to the third world countries who could notactually absorb lactose (Vogel, Motulsky, 1990:41). In this section of the book I tried toconvince the reader that the history of European professional polyphony is in fact aunique his torical case, and it should not be used as the model for the origins of thephenomenon of polyphony. So, the same way as we accepted the fact that not everyonecan drink milk without health complications, we need to accept the fact thattransformation of European professional monophony into polyphony is a uniqueoccurrence in the history of music.And of course, in the course of our current knowledge it is clear that even theorigins of European professional polyphony cannot be considered as a pure case of“monopho nic music evolving into a polyphonic one”. The time when music historiansbelieved that polyphony was invented by the medieval monks and actually were trying toexplain the presence of vocal polyphony in traditional music of people from differentparts of the world as a result of the influence of European missionaries has long sincegone. Siegfried Nadel and particularly Marius Schneider were among the firstmusicologists who reversed our understanding of the origins of European polyphony andwrote that the historical process of the influence between professional and traditionalpolyphonies must be reversed: it is not the medieval European professional polyphonythat influenced the emergence of polyphony in traditional cultures via missionaries, but,on the contrary, it was traditional polyphony that had a crucial influence on theemergence of medieval European professional polyphony. For Nadel and Schneider thisinfluence came mainly from outside the Central regions of the European continent.Caucasian (mainly Georgian) polyphony was given a crucial role in this model by bothNadel (who only expressed this idea as a possibility. Nadel, 1933) and by Schneider (whofirst criticized Nadel’s idea as “going too far”, but soon changed his mind and published aseries of special publications on the origins of polyphony from the 1940s until the 1960s.Schneider, 1940, 1951, 1961, 1969). On the contrary, for Paul Collaer the main influencefor the emergence of European polyphony came from the local European (particularlyMediterranean) polyphonic traditions (Collaer, 1960). Collaer’s idea, that the emergenceof European professional polyphony was in fact a penetration of the ancient Europeantraditional polyphony into their professional music, is widely (although not universally)accepted today. I believe the existing evidence also supports Paul Collaer’s idea.Therefore, today even the origins of European professional polyphony do not lookto mos t of my colleagues as “natural evolution” or the “invention” of a new polyphonicstyle by some talented medieval monks, who dared to go beyond the established traditionof monophonic singing.If we want to understand the mechanisms of the emergency of professionalpolyphony in medieval Europe, we need to remember the origins ofChristian religion