Social networks existed long before Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. But how they formed in ancient times has sometimes stymied scientists. Now, a study in Nature Human Behaviour demonstrates that music played an important role in connecting different hunter-gatherer groups in Central Africa.
Central Africa provides a rich trove of history for anthropologists to plumb. Hunter-gatherers have lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. But finding the cultural connectivity that has developed between communities over that time period is challenging, in part because modernization sometimes squelches older ties.
For instance, scientists suspect that hunter-gathers in the Congo Basin absorbed languages from their farming neighbors, the Bantu. As a result, it’s difficult to tease apart aspects of culture formed from those fairly recent agricultural interactions versus ties from long-term meetings among communities spread throughout the region.
To do just that, a team led by Andrea Migliano from the Department of Evolutionary ...
