Tune in to the evolution of music & sociability

baboon_metaphysics.jpg

Yesterday's Sunday Feature on BBC Radio 3 was program about the evolution of music, by Ivan Hewitt. It isn't available online yet, but should be uploaded onto the Sunday Feature page soon, and will remain there for a week.

The progam features linguist Steven Pinker of Harvard University, who argues that music is a kind of evolutionary by-product, and anthropologist and cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen from the University of Reading in the UK, who believes it was fundamental to human evolution.

And on NPR, there's an interview with husband-and-wife primatologists Dorothy Cheney and Richard Seyfarth, who discuss their work observing the social behaviours of baboons in Botswana's Okavango Delta.

Cheney and Seyfarth are the authors of a newly-published book called Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, an excerpt of which can be found on the University of Chicago Press website. 

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