Patrick E. Savage

TL;DR: It is speculated that group coordination is the common aspect unifying the cross-cultural structural regularities of human music, with implications for the study of music evolution.

TL;DR: Analysis of records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world reveals that moralizing gods follow—rather than precede—large increases in social complexity.

TL;DR: The music and social bonding (MSB) hypothesis provides the most comprehensive theory to date of the biological and cultural evolution of music.

TL;DR: A database of historical and archaeological information from 30 regions around the world over the last 10,000 years revealed that characteristics, such as social scale, economy, features of governance, and information systems, show strong evolutionary relationships with each other and that complexity of a society across different world regions can be meaningfully measured using a single principal component of variation.

TL;DR: Music may have the potential to serve as a novel marker of human migrations to complement genes, language and other markers and suggest that it might have a sufficient time-depth to retrace ancient population movements.