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323mental abilities, but even musical ability is in fact a group of independent musicalabilities.• Another interesting fact that also points to a genetic component in thevocalizations of very young humans was provided by a study, conducted in my nativeGeorgia. According to this study, the very first human vocalizations (cries of newly borninfants) audibly differ from each other in some interesting ways according to theirethnic origins (Japaridze & Strelnikov, 1982).• Very young children were found to have much better general musical abilitiesthan adults. Perfect (or absolute) pitch enables a person to hear the actual pitch without itsrelative position to other pitches. Having a perfect pitch is a norm among infants,although among adults, even among professional musicians, it is very rare (Saffran, 2003;Saffran & Griepentrog, 2001).Therefore, I think we should declare pitch language (or musilanguage) a deadlanguage, arguably the first dead language on our planet. Pitch language prepared thebasis and participated in the creation of speech, or in other words, pitch language“evolved” into a new, much more efficient articulated system of communication -speech. And in the same way, as we hear today plenty of elements of dead Sumerian andLatin in contemporary languages, the elements of the ancient “pitch language” are foundwidely in tone languages. The old suggestion that music grew out of the prosodic elementof speech (suggested by several generations of scholars from Spencer to Pinker) gets theevolutionary sequence of communication development the wrong way around.Pinker is correct, stating that every neurologically normal human can speak, butnot everyone can sing and enjoy other musical activities (Pinker, 1997:529). But let usnot forget that at least 40 000 (or maybe even 300 000) years separate us from themoment when articulated speech revolutionized human language. After this moment thesystem of arbitrary pitch signals was mostly forgotten, and only emotional intonationremained in our speech, as articulated sounds are not very good at expressing ouremotions. And of course, in more than half of the contemporary languages, the oldfunction of the referential and arbitrary use of the pitch element is part of our everydayspeech in tone languages.If we imagine the countless centuries and millennia that went into “forgetting” theancient pitch language, it is a wonder that the majority of humanity still has enoughmusical ability to sing in a choir or play musical instruments. Another very interestingpeculiarity of human musical abilities is that different human populations seems to havedifferent predispositions towards music, and we will discuss this interesting issue later inthis part of the book in the context of the uneven distribution of vocal polyphony on ourplanet.Most of us, unless good users of whistle or drum languages, cannot narrate eventhe simplest plot using music today, but in exactly the same way hardly anyone wouldunderstand if an expert in the ancient Sumerian language narrated a very simple plot inSumerian. This is why these languages are “dead”. On the other hand, the existence of thewhistle and drum languages prove that the sequence of tones (based purely on pitchmodulations) has a tremendous potential in expressing and transferring quite elaborateideas.