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321referential function. In contemporary tone languages both functions of pitch modulationare clear, and they are overlaid on each other in a flow of speech.It seems that during the last major evolutionary change of human communication,when so-called “fully articulated language” came into existence, articulated speech didnot fully replace the older pitch language. In some regions speech replaced the pitchlanguage’s lexical and grammatical functions. In other regions the lexical and evengrammatical functions of pitch language were preserved. This is the case in contemporarytone languages. Therefore it would be more appropriate to talk about the “partialreplacement” of the ancient pitch languages. There is no language in the world that doesnot ma ke use of tone (prosodic elements), and in tone languages many more instances ofthe referential use of the ancient pitch element are preserved.• Pitch language: The first Dead Language inHuman HistoryThe statement of Steven Pinker, that “even a plot as simple as ‘Boy meets girl,boy loses girl’ cannot be narrated by a sequence of tones in any musical idiom” does nottell us the whole truth. In the example of whistle and drum languages we can see thatpitch contour can convey meaning precise enough to enable quite complex commercialagreements to made between two parties. Despite this possibility, today pitch-basedlanguage is used only as a marginal means of communication, mostly for communicatingover big distances. Readers might remember Karl Stumpf’s interest in pitch-basedcommunication over long distances from the brief survey of different ideas on the originsof music earlier in this part of the book. This need in referential pitch communication wasmostly lost after the much more efficient medium – speech - entered the scene, so unlesswe need to communicate over big distances in the mountains of Central America or theAfrican savannah, we communicate with speech.Our Australopithecine ancestors were roaming the African savanna during thelongest period of our prehistory, when time was passing in millions of years. During thisperiod our ancestors learned to survive without the safety of tree branches, sharing theground with major African predators. We have already discussed the possible survivalimportance of loud singing and shouting displays, magnified by the precise rhythmicstomping of a whole collective of hominids. The impressive “lion dance”, very effectivefor defence (and even attack to obtain carcasses), was more an ancestor of future humanmusic than a language. The language of more “peaceful” everyday communication musthave been quite different, although still mostly based on the pitch element (modulationsof a fundamental frequency).This early system of communication I will be mentioning with a term “pitchlanguage”. Pitch language is a referential system of communication, basedpredominantly on pitch modulations (See also Fonagy, 1981). Freedom from limbiccontrol and cultural learning during the early years were its other characteristics.Increasing data about the freedom from limbic control of primate vocalizations suggestthat both these featurescould have been present among our ancestors before theemergence of bipedal Australopithecines. At least at the stage of Australopithecine these