Merp @dubsyeah - Tumblr Blog

Frosty home grown green crack …

everythingfox

toastbutteregg

#buddhagrass #indica illusions

buddhagrass

#buddhagrass #indica illusions

#indica illusions #BUDDHAGRASS

kingkumaaa

When the whole party is down but your bard is up

r10t3r

i see no difference

blackreaders-assemble

I laughed way too hard

talesfromthecrypts

I am Smaug! I kill when I wish! I am strong, strong, strong! My armor is like tenfold shields! My teeth are like swords! My claws, spears! The shock of my tail, a thunderbolt! My wings, a hurricane! And my breath… death! Well? Where are your riddles now?

dubsyeah

This was my favorite movie as a kid

#smaug

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

sometimes i remember humans invented music 60,000 years before they invented the wheel and it blows my mind every time

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

and actually, I should have specified that 67,000 years ago is just when they invented musical instruments (specifically bone flutes ). we’ve had language for up to 200,000 years, and i’d be surprised if we didn’t have some form of singing since long before that.

for reference, wheel technology is about 5,500 years old, and humans didn’t invent metalworking until about 6,500 years ago

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

#but anyway #musical instruments as a concept are OLD. and i guarantee we’ve been using our voices to make music for much longer. to be clear, the stock characters we think of as ‘cavemen’ wouldn’t have had metalworking or wheels or writing. but they would have had hearths and cooking and language and stories and music. so you tell me what makes us “human”

underthehedge

There are many theories on the evolution of speech but my favourite is that we sang before we talked and may have provided a whole bunch of the vital pre-adaptations we needed for complex vocal communication. This is not my area and I’m sure there’s glaring issues with my understanding of the theory but it’s emotionally pleasing and fun to think about at least.

Think about the things you need to be able to do to make human speech, the adaptations that need to be in place before you can do words: You need to be able to control the rate and patterning of your exhalation (thanks bipedality!), to stop and start it at the diaphragm and the the lips. You need to be able to pitch it up and down, to add stress by making some bits more forceful than others. You need have a rhythm to it so your words flow and so your listener can tell where one bit starts and another ends. You need to be able to modulate vowel sounds and move your lips and teeth and tongue to create consonants and you need to make it into a repeatable pattern.

You can’t really jump straight into full speech from an ancestor with the same types of vocal control as our nearest relatives, but you know what you can do on your way there? You can sing. You can make songs out of pure sound, you can make songs out of humming and aaah and shh and ch! and t! t! t! And you can tell others things with just these sounds, you can make them sound happy or sad or excited without a single word, and they can join in. Cos humans fuckin love singing together, it makes us feel connected and joyous. Have you ever been in a crowd of people at an event, in a bar, in a religious thingy, in a choir, and sung the same song as everyone else? I’ve never felt more human and connected and as full of endorphins as I have being surrounded by other people as we all sing as one.

We sing to small children, the way we talk to small children is half song. We sing to our pets and we sing about little tasks we are doing, and as long as we’ve been singing, someone will have been clapping, or stamping their feet, or hitting a stick on something. When we sing together we share our emotions, and we’ve probably been doing this a very long time. Cos the real prerequisite for all this? Bipedality. Gorillas sing happy little songs to themselves when they sit to eat but generally speaking, quadrupeds have to breath in time with their walking. But we walk on two legs, meaning we can move and breath independently, we can control our breath while walking. Tl;dr: Humans have possibly been singing wordless songs to and with each other since we stood on two legs, humming our way across the savanahs and knowing our friends were close by.