@article {309007, title = {Correlations in the population structure of music, genes and language.}, journal = {Proc Biol Sci}, volume = {281}, year = {2014}, note = {http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1774/20132072.full?sid=84057839-3d87-4a6a-93de-693b26a3adf9}, month = {2014 Jan 7}, pages = {20132072}, abstract = {

We present, to our knowledge, the first quantitative evidence that music and genes may have coevolved by demonstrating significant correlations between traditional group-level folk songs and mitochondrial DNA variation among nine indigenous populations of Taiwan. These correlations were of comparable magnitude to those between language and genes for the same populations, although music and language were not significantly correlated with one another. An examination of population structure for genetics showed stronger parallels to music than to language. Overall, the results suggest that music might have a sufficient time-depth to retrace ancient population movements and, additionally, that it might be capturing different aspects of population history than language. Music may therefore have the potential to serve as a novel marker of human migrations to complement genes, language and other markers.

}, keywords = {Asian Continental Ancestry Group, DNA, Mitochondrial, Evolution, Molecular, Haplotypes, Human Migration, Humans, Language, Molecular Sequence Data, Music, Population Dynamics, Taiwan}, issn = {1471-2954}, doi = {10.1098/rspb.2013.2072}, url = {http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24225453}, author = {Brown, Steven and Savage, Patrick E and Ko, Albert Min-Shan and Stoneking, Mark and Ko, Ying-Chin and Loo, Jun-Hun and Trejaut, Jean A} }