> Furthermore, our results support the idea that music is remembered implicitly, akin to remembering a complex series of movements, rather than as a discrete entity or specific countable events.

Iain McGilchrist will be pleased, as this appears to suggest music predates language. I quote from his book "The Master and His Emissary," a very thought-provoking book (although he overreaches quite a bit at times) in which one of his main theses is that we do not give the implicit parts of our brain enough credit:

> Fairly obviously, one might think, language must have developed for communication. But that is not as obvious as it seems. Some 300-400,000 years ago or longer, homo heidelbergensis, the common ancestor of homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis, had a large brain and a vocal apparatus comparable to those of modern humans, and, although we cannot be sure of the earliest dates such features arose, it may well have been as long ago as about half a million years. However, the evidence suggests that we did not develop the degree of sophisticated symbol manipulation that language requires until a much later point, possibly as little as 40,000 years ago, but at any rate not earlier than a mere 80,000 years ago, when the first cultural artefacts, along with evidence of visual representation, suddenly and profusely arise, and humans began to adopt ritualised burial of the dead.

> It would seem, then, that for most of human history, despite a large brain and presumably high intelligence, they managed to communicate satisfactory without language as we understand it. Admittedly they were not civilised in the true meaning of the word. But they survived and thrived as social animals, living in groups. How did our ancestors communicate adequately, if not by language?

> When did humans develop these capacities? Some ingenious observations allow a reliable inference to be made.In order to reach the tongue, the nerve which supplies it, the hypoglossal nerve, has to pass through an opening in the base of the skull, called the anterior condylar canal. The amount of work a nerve has to do is reflected in its size; in turn the size of the hole through which it passes indicates the size of the nerve. So by measuring the size of the canal in the base of the skull, we can get a very good idea of how much articulatory work the tongue of the skull's 'owner' had to do.

> We know that spoken language is dependent, not only on sufficient brain space to house the dictionary and grammar, but on quite specific features of the vocal apparatus (not just the vocal cords, but the articulatory bits and pieces of the tongue and mouth) enabling us to articulate a wide range of sounds, as well as on a remarkable degree of respiratory control, allowing us to sustain long, fluent, articulated phrases and to modulate intonation subtly over the length of a single breath.

> But, and here is the thought-provoking oddity, examination of the earliest human skeletons, from long before the time we believe language arose, reveals canal sizes almost indistinguishable from those of modern humans. Why is that? The most likely answer is a surprise, and requires a bit of a frame shift for most of us. For the explanation of this sophisticated control and modulation of the production of sound, in the absence of language as we know it, has to be that it was for a sort of non-verbal language, one in which there was intonation and phrasing, but no actual words: and what is that, if not music?