Correlations in the population structure of music, genes and language.

Bibliographic Collection: 
APE
Publication Type: Journal Article
Authors: Brown, Steven; Savage, Patrick E; Ko, Albert Min-Shan; Stoneking, Mark; Ko, Ying-Chin; Loo, Jun-Hun; Trejaut, Jean A
Year of Publication: 2014
Journal: Proc Biol Sci
Volume: 281
Issue: 1774
Pagination: 20132072
Date Published: 2014 Jan 7
Publication Language: eng
ISSN: 1471-2954
Keywords: Asian Continental Ancestry Group, DNA, Mitochondrial, Evolution, Molecular, Haplotypes, Human Migration, Humans, Language, Molecular Sequence Data, Music, Population Dynamics, Taiwan
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.

DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2013.2072
Alternate Journal: Proc. Biol. Sci.