Luc, and lullabies

France is a country of intellectual abundance and scientific heritage. Toulouse, for example, is an important city for high technology, with the aerospace industry and Airbus.

Here is Helen, her grandson Luc and her daughter Avril, mother of Luc. Luc has just had a bath, and soon he will be tucked away in a car seat for the drive home.  He has listened to his grandmother hum and sing through his routines for a few hours and he is as content as a child can possibly be.  Once he is in the car, the movement and motor will calm him to sleep.

Singing lullabies to sooth children is a universal practice, at least historically.  It is still evident in societies where people outnumber machines.  My instinct about lullabies is that they were the invention of early human mothers to calm their infants if predators or aggressors were near.  Think what would happen to them, and their group, if a baby squalled.

Our human ancestors were scavengers that used stone tools to carve away at the remains left by animal hunters, according to findings at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.  They were prey for the multitude of carnivores prowling the earth 2.5 million years ago.  The development of hunting by humans came later, with the ability to transform stone tools into weapons.  The human predator was born.

Uuuuh, so about lullabies.  Strangely, even while there has been an explosion of research on the brain since the 1950's, including cognitive psychology and the impacts of music, insights on the role of mothers, infants and lullabies in human cultural evolution is hard to come by.  At least, it is from a car seat on which I am perched, in our "crash pad" apartment, with wireless Internet circa 2010.  Not much on the Web.

Two books on primate behaviour that I happen to have here are by Desmond Morris and  Frans de Waal, but they are silent on primate lullabies.  There are a few snippets of information in the book by music researcher Daniel Levitin who wrote The World in Six Songs, and in his book, a lead to Professor Sandra Trehub, at the University of Toronto.  So here's something about her research work on lullabies: http://www.utm.utoronto.ca/strehub.0.html.

Readers, if you find out about other investigations on lullabies, send a comment or an Email.  Before our grandchildren have robot nannies, I think we need to get to the bottom of this.