Joseph Jordania's model of music's origin: group rhythm as predator defense, the audio-visual intimidation display that turned scattered hominids into one fearless animal.
Documented
The model as published
Jordania's Why Do People Sing? (2011), building on his 2006 work: synchronous group singing, drumming, and stamping put early humans into a battle trance, fear gone, pain gone, individual identity dissolved into a collective one, while the coordinated din worked outward as an intimidation display against predators and rival groups. Rhythmic unity makes a group louder, signals its cohesion, and bonds its members; the model accounts for all three at once.
Assessment: Documented as a serious, argued, cross-cultural model from a working ethnomusicologist. It is a minority position in a field with no majority one, which is the honest state of music-origins science.
Stories
The tradition never stopped
The Maori haka and the Samoan cibi are open intimidation displays, run before battles and rugby matches alike. And the living evidence is not ceremonial: Jonathan Pieslak's Sound Targets (2009) documented American soldiers in Iraq blasting heavy music together before missions, reporting they could not reach combat readiness without it. Nobody teaches them to do it. The trance self-assembles.
Assessment: Stories: the ethnography and Pieslak's interviews are real and published. What they prove is continuity of practice, not of origin; the archive notes the difference and keeps the pattern.
Interesting claims
The highest instinct we have
Jordania's sharpest claim: the battle trance is not a relic, it is the top of the instinct hierarchy, and religion, nationalism, and altruism are its descendants. If he is right, every stadium chorus, protest chant, and drill beat is the same weapons system, repurposed or merely stored. The interesting question stops being where music came from and becomes what it is still for.
Assessment: Interesting: the mechanism is observable at any concert tonight. The genealogy, religion and solidarity as trance descendants, is inference stacked on inference. A claim that explains everything risks explaining nothing, and the trance does not care.
Sources and further reading
Jordania, Why Do People Sing? Music in Human Evolution (Logos, 2011)
Jordania, Who Asked the First Question? (2006), choral polyphony and the origins of speech
Pieslak, Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (2009)
the haka, cibi, and kailao war-dance ethnographic record
Worth asking
Is the mosh pit a ritual, a relic, or a weapons system in storage?