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Animal Sounds and Human Communication
Animals use other signalling devices as well: smell and sight. But sound has several advantages:
- Sound works when the signaller and receiver are far apart, even though they can see each other.
- Sound works when the signaller and receiver cannot see each other because it’s too dark or because objects such as bushes or rocks stand between them.
- Sound can carry messages that vary with the signaller’s call.
Our Homo sapiens ancestors, with incredibly effective sound-based signalling and communication adaptations we call music and language, out-survived all other hominid species. Evolutionary biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, and musicologists have come up with several well-supported hypotheses about selective pressures that gave rise to the human adaptation for music. These explanations do not mutually exclude each other. Following are some of the main ones.