Language, Music and Mind: A View from the Past
by Steven Mithen
April 27-29, 2026
About the Seminar
The Hekimbaşı Center for Advanced Studies is pleased to host a seminar series by Steven Mithen, one of the leading scholars in prehistoric archaeology and cognitive evolution. Mithen is Professor of Early Prehistory at the University of Reading and is internationally recognized for his interdisciplinary work on the origins of human cognition, language, and culture.
In these seminars, the relationships between language, music, culture and mind will be explored by examining how these co-evolved during the last six million years and the legacy of that evolutionary history for how humans think and act today.
The seminars will start by reviewing current knowledge of the evolutionary past from the time of the common ancestor to humans and chimpanzees at six million years ago, through ancestral species of Homo habilis and Homo erectus, to the Neanderthals, Denisovans and the emergence of Homo sapiens at 300,000 years ago. From there, consideration will be given to how Homo sapiens continued to evolve, its dispersal from Africa and the invention of farming at 10,000 years ago.
The seminars will address when during that evolutionary past language appeared, how and why it appeared, and whether language evolved by tiny incremental steps in the ability to make words or through one or more pulses of rapid evolutionary development. It will also examine what can be learned from the stone artefacts, fireplaces and works of art left behind by ancestors and relatives. Addressing these questions will lead into the nature of language and of languages, exploring types of words and forms of grammar. The relationships between language and thought and between language and music will be considered, finding as much value in the Enlightenment ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder as in the recent discoveries of neuroscience and genetics.
The seminars will put forward the proposition that the roots of language lie within musicality, that forms of language were present amongst many ancestors, notably the Neanderthals, but that only modern humans after 100,000 years ago evolved the capacity for thinking and communicating using metaphors. This development transformed language and was a direct cause for the emergence of farming societies at 10,000 years ago, which marked a turning point in human history.
The seminars will draw on three books by Steven Mithen:
The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the Origins of Art, Religion and Science (1996, London: Thames & Hudson)
The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Language, Music, Mind and Body (2005, London; Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
The Language Puzzle: How We Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age (2024, London: Profile Books)
Fee
Participation is free of charge.
Quota
11 Participants
Schedule
Schedule will announce later
Transportation and Other Services
Participants are provided with a shuttle service to and from Üsküdar Square. Lunches and other refreshments are offered free of charge.
Contact
İrem Gündoğdu – iremgundogdu@hekimbasi.center