3. Courtship
Humans share their feelings by singing and dancing, they develop a sense
of belonging together, friendships emerge. Good dancers and singers are
preferred by the opposite gender. Some animals have melodies and sound
to attract a mate, to generate a “community emotion” and to
communicate. Whales and dolphins “sing” and wolves howl, many bird
species sing, maybe because many bird species have only one partner to
raise their offspring (lifelong “matrimony”), they also sing for
attracting and choosing a mate. Anthropologist Mary Batten (USA,http://www.marybatten.com ) writes in her book “Sexual
strategies-how females choose their mates” that the order “primates”
includes more species with monogamous behavior than any other mammalian
order. Birds do also sing and twitter to defend their territory or to
mark it, as a signal: Every male bird of the same species will be
attacked if he crosses the border of the territory. Only humans have a
language with many words, so only humans have songs with lyrics.
Evolution gave our ancestors music and made them and us gregarious, and
the present shows the relative success of mankind over other animals.
Orang-Utan researcher Birute Galdikas reports that her mentor,
anthropologist Louis Leakey was convinced that women are better
observers and recognize details better, even those which at the moment
may seem irrelevant. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote: ”In the true man there
is a child hidden: it wanted to play. Up then, ye women, and discover
the child in man!”. These assumptions are confirmed by the research of
Doris Bischof-Koehler, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, see the end
of my short text.