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313he changed his view and linked the origins of singing to the period of tool-makingtechnologies (Livingstone, 1983).• Roger Wescott suggested that the earliest predecessor of human languageamong Australopithecines was pitch-based, but non-vocal whistling, combined with someother non-vocal sounds like “hand clapping, foot stamping, and drumming on their chestsor on external objects” (Wescott, 1973:27, also 1971).• Miron Kharlap considered the origins of music within a ‘Spencerian’ model,with singing growing out of the prosodic elements of human speech. Most importantlyfor the topic of this book, Kharlap suggested that the historical development of humanmusical culture went not from monophony to polyphony, as it was universally believedby music historians, but from polyphony to monophony, from group to individualmusical activity and talked in this context about the origins of monophony frompolyphony (Kharlap, 1973). We will specifically discuss the importance of this idea laterin the book.• Ivan Fonagy suggested that our ancestors’ language was musical and the pitchmodulations carried the meaning of communication directly. Speech evolved later as amore complex system to express more complex ideas more efficiently (Fonagy, 1981).• Juan Roederer specially looked for the survival value of music and suggestedthat music was developed to play the role of a device to assist the human brain inacquiring language (Roederer, 1984).• Izaly Zemtsovsky in his publications stressed the importance of intonation in thedevelopment of initial forms of human musical activity (Zemtsovsky, 1986) and thecrucial importance of dialogical forms of communication for the origins and the initialforms of group singing (Zemtsovsky, 1986, 1986a). Zemtsovsky and three followingauthors were participants in the special conference dedicated to the genesis andspecificity of early forms of musical culture held in Dilijan, Armenia in 1986.• Viacheslav Ivanov suggested that the presence of “personal songs” for eachmember of society in different cultures might indicate this was the oldest form ofpersonal “naming”. He also stressed the importance of the neurological aspect of musicalactivity, suggesting that music could play a crucial role in memorizing important texts inearly human history (before the advent of a system of writing. Ivanov, 1986).• Boris Frolov and A. Demirkhanian stressed the crucial importance of rhythm inthe initial stages of the development of human musical and social activities(Demirkhanian, Frolov, 1986. See also Frolov, 1986).• Joseph Jordania, the author of this book, in his first publications on this topicsuggested distinguishing musical language and musical culture and argued that thedivision of human cultures into polyphonic and monophonic groups must have startedduring the early stages of human evolution (Jordania, 1986a, see also his later works,including this book).• James Brown and William Greenhood noted the evolutionary primacy ofmusical communication and suggested that the melodic utterances of Homo erectuschanged into staccato-like speech with long utterances at the homo sapiens stage (Brown& Greenhood, 1991).• Nils Wallin researched the biological foundations of human musical abilities,based on a multidisciplinary approach to the human brain, physiology, auditory and vocalsystems (Wallin, 1991). Together with Bjorn Merker and Steven Brown Wallin he