What is it about?
Collective song and dance releases endorphins, the brain's natural drugs, and this gives participants a powerful sense of togetherness and belonging. Mob violence that targets misfits and outsiders might have evolved specifically to enforce cooperation by all individuals in early human (i.e. hominin) societies. This article explains how mob violence against misfits could have evolved out of a collective song and dance routine that served to bond members of the social group.
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Why is it important?
The evolution of the human mind, and particularly of spoken language, depended on an exceptionally high degree of cooperation between the members of early human social groups. How such a level of cooperation could have been achieved has long been regarded as one of the most perplexing puzzles in the study of the evolution of the human mind. This article offers a relatively simple solution to the problem, based on scientific research, observation and experimentation done by leading experts over the last few decades.
Perspectives
Mobbing, or ganging up against an individual that is usually an outsider or misfit, is a pervasive feature of human society, from the school playground to the office space. If it played a pivotal role in the evolution of early human culture and cognition as argued in this article, this would explain why it is so deeply ingrained in the modern human psychological make-up, and why this social dynamic that is so devastating to its victims is so difficult to counter.
Deon Liebenberg
Cape Peninsula University of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Music, dance, synchrony, and conformity: Dealing with non-cooperation in early hominin culture, December 2017, Akademiai Kiado,
DOI: 10.1556/2050.2017.0002.
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