who asked the first question? - International Research Center For ...

329years after 1996, if I see a new encyclopedia or a book on the origins of human languageof intelligence, I routinely check at least the index for “questions”, “interrogatives”, and“asking questions”. Still no results. Questions are so natural and so prevalent in everymoment of our life and communication that we simply fail to notice them.Let us make up for our neglect of the basics of human behavior and for few nextsections of this book concentrate on different aspects of questioning behavior in humanlife and evolution.Questions in Music:Musical DialogueOn 10 th of November 1986, at the opening of the second conference on traditionalpolyphony, held in the beautiful mountainous resort of Borjomi in Georgia, IzalyZemtsovsky delivered a paper “Problems of Musical Dialogue: Antiphony andDiaphony”. The paper was based on the fact of the extremely wide use of antiphonalsinging in polyphonic cultures, and the idea was expressed that diaphony (this term issometimes used for two-part singing), and hence the phenomenon of polyphony, hadcrucial connections to the phenomenon of dialogue in music. In my opinion this is one ofthe most productive ideas about the phenomenon of polyphony expressed inethnomusicology. At that conference we published only the extended summaries of thepapers (Zemtsovsky, 1986). In 1991 the extended paper was delivered at the conferenceof the ESEM (European Seminar in Ethnomusicology) and the short version of the paperwas later published in French (Zemtsovsky, 1993). The full text of the paper was finallypublished in Russian in June 2006 (Zemtsovsky, 2006).This is a fact that no musicologist would try to deny – antiphonal and responsorialsinging is an integral part of the polyphonic tradition. Even in traditional monophoniccultures, when groups of people sing together in unison, alternation between a soloist anda group, or two groups is widespread. That’s why I included antiphonal and responsorialsinging as one of the crucial elements of the hypothetic “primordial” or “protopolyphony”of our hominid ancestors.Let us now try to put together the human questioning behavior and thephenomenon of dialogue, two basic elements of human communication. I hope most ofthe readers would agree that we do not need much speculation to imagine the closeevolutionary connections between these two phenomena. The connections are so obviousthat I think it would be difficult to argue that questioning and dialogue could existwithout each other.They actually could. Humans can have a dialogue without asking questions toeach other, just sharing ideas, opinions or stating facts, something like this:“Last night I watched the Australia-Brazil game on TV”“I did not. I had to get up early in the morning so I went to sleep early”.“I think Australia was a bit unlucky to lose.”“Maybe,but Brazil could have scored more goals as well”.