Musicality comprises a set of capabilities that evolved and co-evolved to support multiple functions (Savage et al., target article). Here, I seek to fill in a gap in each target article with evidence suggesting a different putative function of music (while remaining agnostic as to which of the two models offers the more compelling account of music's origins). I present evidence for a category of ancient songs that solved an important adaptive problem: The transmission of essential knowledge that increased adaptive fitness of individuals and the community. This proposal is consistent with, and requires no modification, to either model.

Modern Homo sapiens have been around for 60,000–200,000 years (Wilshaw, Reference Wilshaw2018). Written language emerged autochthonously around the world only about 5,000 years ago, facilitating the preservation and transmission of information. For millennia before that, however, survival information was transmitted across generations through oral traditions – storytelling and song (Berkes, Colding, & Folke, Reference Berkes, Colding and Folke2000; Reyes-García & Fernández-Llamazares, Reference Reyes-García and Fernández-Llamazares2019; Rubin, Reference Rubin1995); stories and songs constituted the fundamental pedagogical devices of preliterate societies (Coe, Reference Coe2003; Jennings et al., Reference Jennings, Antrobus, Atencio, Glavich, Johnson, Loffler and Jennings2005; Scalise-Sugiyama, Reference Scalise-Sugiyama2011). The songs of preliterate societies preserved and transmitted information about fitness hazards, ethnobiological knowledge, food gathering, morality, mythology, kinship, medicine, and practical skills (Lord, Reference Lord1960; Scalise-Sugiyama, Reference Scalise-Sugiyama1996; Schniter et al., Reference Schniter, Wilcox, Beheim, Kaplan and Gurven2018) – what I will collectively call knowledge songs.

Music-making incurs opportunity costs (Mehr & Krasnow, Reference Mehr and Krasnow2017) that must be offset by the individual or collective benefit. Adaptations must show a clear fit between the unique design features they offer and the problems they putatively solved. The opportunity costs of music-making would be outweighed by songs that enable knowledge transmission (as well as other functions discussed in the target articles). Musicality may constitute an adaptation because it is uniquely suited to encode and preserve information, in a way that spoken language alone cannot, and that served the needs of pre-literate humans for tens of thousands of years (and still serves the needs of pre-literate cultures today).

Meaning and sound patterns are paired arbitrarily in speech (Rubin, Stoltzfus, & Wall, Reference Rubin, Stoltzfus and Wall1991) but music aids word recall (Rubin, Reference Rubin1995). In music, the mutually reinforcing cues of meter, accent structure, melodic contour, prosody, rhythm, and rhyme, create constraints on lyrics that preserve them with far greater accuracy than is found in non-musical oral memory (Hyman & Rubin, Reference Hyman and Rubin1990; Kintsch, Reference Kintsch1988; Lattimore, Reference Lattimore1951; Palmer & Kelly, Reference Palmer and Kelly1992; Rubin et al., Reference Rubin, Stoltzfus and Wall1991; Schwanenflugel & LaCount, Reference Schwanenflugel and LaCount1988).

Mehr et al.'s (Reference Mehr, Singh, Knox, Ketter, Pickens-Jones, Atwood and Glowacki2019) landmark study revealed 20 widespread functional contexts for music (a single song can be assigned more than one category). Absent from their list are knowledge songs. Levitin (Reference Levitin2008) examined corpora of recorded music from contemporary preliterate subsistence cultures from every continent, and found that knowledge songs were ubiquitous, transmitting information about identification of plants and animals, kinship, daily routines, food preparation, healing practices, practical skills (e.g., fishing, hunting, trapping, and hut building), tribal history, and prescribed behaviors.

I reanalyzed Mehr et al.'s dataset of 4,700 ethnographies, and searched for these terms and related keywords (transmission, avoidance and taboo, instructions & education including sex restrictions, geography, history, mythology and literary texts and literature). Of the 4,700 songs in the corpus, 1,007 unique entries fit these criteria, or roughly 20%, converging with Levitin's (Reference Levitin2008) analysis of a different set of corpora.

A typical song is from a 105 year-old chief of the Blackfoot tribe in Montana, described by the ethnographer as “a memory ethnograph” with songs that encapsulate oral history (Ehrafworld cultures, n.d.). Or consider the Gola of West Africa who are typical in placing a high value on the preservation and transmission of tribal and kinship history through song (D'Azevedo, Reference D'Azevedo1962). The knowledge of kinship origins can help establish among contemporaries familial connections and reciprocal responsibilities; being able to claim a relative during a famine can mean the difference between life and death.

There is overlap, of course, in the assignment of songs to such categories. The plethora of songs about burial practices occurs in the context of ritual or ceremonial songs, and is also passing on procedural information. Similarly, songs about healing bridge shamanistic, spiritual, and medical practices with procedural information (do it this way, and in this order).

Today, we may think of music as primarily about emotional communication but this could be an ethnocentric bias; before written language, music shows evidence of a superior preservation system than speech alone. And there exist vestiges of knowledge music in contemporary, advanced literate society supporting an “ultimate level explanation” (Mehr et al., target article). For example, most children learn the alphabet and number line through songs, and some learn body parts and the left-right distinction (e.g., The Hokey Pokey), as well as social justice (If I Had A Hammer, We Shall Overcome).

The survival prospects of individuals and groups are enhanced by a capacity to communicate certain information about states of affairs in the physical world, and about the social world that concerns the organism (Cross, Reference Cross, Klockars and Peltomaa2007). The ideal communication system would allow individuals to communicate knowledge about current conditions such as the availability and locations of resources, to make possible their sharing. Perceptions of dangers would need to be identified and appropriate actions coordinated; social relationships would need to be articulated and sustained. Why is music necessary and even better than language for such tasks? Because music, especially rhythmic, patterned music of the kind we typically associate with songs, provides a more powerful mnemonic force for encoding knowledge, vital and shared information that entire societies need to know, teachings that are handed down by parents to their children and that children can easily memorize (Levitin, Reference Levitin2008; Rubin, Reference Rubin1995).

Knowledge songs shared within a tribe and family would have constituted one of the greatest forms of social bonding, allowing for the transmission of culture and survival information before the written word existed. Our transformation from club-wielding early hominids to the architects of great metropolises, discoverers of the scientific method, and listeners to Weird Al Yankovic, owes its deep history to knowledge conveyed in music over the millennia that preceded writing systems.