Evolution of Music Appreciation

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One of the things that I have an interest for is thinking of any human trait (very often psychological), and then wondering why that trait evolved to be the way it is. One trait that I've found it very hard to find an evolutionary explanation for is our appreciation for music. Why is it that it pleases us to listen to music?

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Appreciation for music doesn't seem at first glance to be directly beneficial to our survival. One thing that my friend suggested is that it could be a sort of side-effect of another trait that we developed. I have trouble thinking of what this trait might be.

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Dr. Alison Wray has put forward a theory that, in fact, music is a by product of communication behavior from our ancestors that predates language. Dr. Stephen J. Mithen has analyzed this theory very extensively in his book "The Singing Neanderthals" and I have to say that I am very sympathetic to his analysis.The idea is that some very rudimentary forms of communication evolved as a substitution for grooming (originally Robin Dunbar's theory, but for language instead of singing; grooming is an extremely important behavior for all social apes that we appear to have "lost" but which Dunbar points out that really we have just substituted with language). This would includes gestures and call signs (much like other apes and birds use.) As our brains got more sophisticated, our call sign vocabulary got larger, and our ability to distinguish pitch and tempo got better until musical patterns became a natural dimension to exploit.Music provided a very limited ability to encode any vocabulary, but the vocabulary we needed was commensurate with the sophistication of our behavior. The levels of behavior can be distinctly broken down to 1) Oldowan tools, 2) Fire + Acheluen tools, 3) Fire + Acheluen tools + wooden spears, 4) Fire + Harpoons + Arrow heads + poison + cave painting + water caches + etc.Mithen's version of the theory states that musical based communication corresponds to stage 3) which is what heidelbergensis, neanderthal and the very early archaic H. sapiens achieved. He suggests that a precursor to music may have developed by 2) (later Homo ergaster) for the purposes of making the "grandmother hypothesis" work. I.e., women were living longer (past menopause) and would help take care of other people's babies (which were becoming high maintenance, especially since we lost our hair which babies could now no longer grasp), while mothers were obtaining food. So women learned some kind of "baby talk" as a means of keeping their babies calm and helping them develop.Stage 4) required language and Mithen suggests that this developed only in the last 70-50K years because that's when we see evidence for this complex behavior. However recent archaeological finds suggest that this needs to be pushed back possibly as far as 164K years ago (that's in the idaltu time frame and *before* the Skhul Cave finds). Apparently some "small tools" have been found that date this early. (However, this complicates a personal theory of mine that I am not yet ready to share with the world; especially now that it seems I need to rework it.)Stage 1) in case you were curious is just the Homo habilis stage, which provided the first postive feedback mechanism for growing more sophisticated brains, turning this into a selected trait.Mithen supports his analysis fairly well. The icing on the cake, I think, is a cave he refers to (I can't remember the name of it) which has truly awesome acoustics. It is clear that Neanderthals hung around in that cave from a hearth that was build there as well as certain boundaries outlined in the ground. There are no animal or fossils or cave paintings or tools anywhere in that cave and the carbon remnants predate the appearance of "Cromagnon" in europe. But there are stactites and stalagmites there. So what the hell were they doing in there? Banging on the rock formations in the cave makes it clear -- they made music there; it was a paleolithic night club.