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311Singing in Peaceful Times:Towards the Origins of Human LanguageSinging definitely had other that defence (and attacking) functions among ourhominid ancestors. In the first place, hominids were able to design a unique new “liondance” because most likely singing (even group singing) was a part of their everyday lifeamongst the tree branches. The big change to their group singing style after theydescended from the trees was the unstoppable rhythm, initiated by the group stomping.The newly found exciting hypnotic element – rhythm - must have soon enteredthe other side of the hominids’ singing life. I have already mentioned that the “liondance” was most likely soon transformed into a ritual context, when a lion was notaround, as the celebration of a victory over a powerful enemy. This feature of celebratinga big victory with group rhythmic chanting is still a large part of human culture. As I amwriting these words, the 2006 World Cup just started in Germany. We do not know thewinner yet, but we can be sure that the mass rhythmic chanting and dancing will followthe win of the cup on the 9 th of July in the winning country. I remember myself chantingrhythmically together with hundreds of thousands of happy Georgians who werespontaneously celebrating on the streets almost the whole night after our Georgianfootball team Dynamo Tbilisi won the European Cup Owner’s Cup on May 13 th 1981. Agreat feeling.Group rhythmic singing and dancing must have been a powerful means of humangroup unity, and the combined strength provided assurance, no question about that, but inthis section we are interested in other functions of hominid singing. Uniting big groups issomething that singing is very good at, but singing in the animal kingdom (and amongour ancestors) had a less “adrenalin-fuelled” function as well. I am talking about thefunction of everyday communication.Music as communication is as old a topic of scholarly discussions as the origin ofmusic or language. Despite the assertion of one of the most recent publications on theorigins of music, “Singing Neanderthal” (Mithen, 2005:2), that works about the origins ofmusic are non-existent with the exception of a few pages in Darwin’s 1871 book, a 1973book by John Blacking and a few other contributions in recent years (including a recentcollection of articles “The Origins of Music” - Wallin et al., 2000), plenty of scholarsapproached the problem of the origins of music in different times and in differentlanguages. Here are some of the authors and ideas on this topic in rough chronologicalorder:• Jean-Jacques Rousseau was possibly the first scholar after the 1700s who wroteabout the origins of music. According to his views, both music and speech had a commonancestor. This initial human communication was based mostly on singing, and it wasmore passionate and emotion-driven than contemporary human language (Rousseau,1761).