From: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20140907-does-music-pre-date-modern-man

Many traditional instruments are made from perishable materials that rot away relatively quickly. This means it may be very difficult to find the earliest objects used for making music, let alone establish whether Neanderthals made use of them.

But in a sense this doesn’t really matter. There is one musical instrument researchers can say with some confidence substantially predates 40,000 years - and it’s one that Neanderthals almost certainly had at their disposal. The human voice may have gained its full vocal range at least 530,000 years ago, suggesting several species of extinct human - including Neanderthals - had the potential to sing.

We know this because of some remarkable fossil finds made within the last decade or so. There is a tiny horseshoe-shaped bone in our neck called the hyoid, and some researchers think its shape changed when our voice box moved down our throat to take up a position that allows us to talk and sing. Archaeologists have now found a small number of these fragile hyoids belonging to Neanderthals and to another, earlier human species called Homo heidelbergensis: they have the same shape as the modern human hyoid.

“I take the view that when the vocal anatomy looked like ours you can conclude that they had vocal abilities rather like ours, as long as they could control it,” says Morley.

The voice box may actually have begun to descend even earlier. Its soft tissue doesn’t preserve in human fossils, but its lower position in our necks affects the shape of the base of our skulls. A careful look at ancient skulls suggests even those belonging to our 1.8-million-year-old forerunners had slightly descended voice boxes. This means our ancestors may have had some crude ability to sing for a very long time, and that the ability gradually improved through time. If so, this would imply that humans had something to gain from using the pitch and tone of their voice - but what?

Charles Darwin, the 19th century naturalist and father of evolutionary biology, was one of the first to try to explain why humans became musical. In his 1871 book on evolutionary theory The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, he proposed it was analogous to bird song, in that it helped males attract mates and warn off rivals. The idea has now largely fallen out of fashion, though, because singing is not an exclusively male pastime: in almost three-quarters of songbirds, for instance, females sing too.

More recently Thomas Geissmann at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, came up with another interesting theory. In a book published in the year 2000, he pointed out that the four other singing primates (some lemurs, tarsiers, titi monkeys and gibbons) all form monogamous breeding pairs - as do many humans, and amongst birds duetting mainly occurs in monogamous species. Perhaps, Geissmann suggested, singing is somehow related to the evolution of monogamy - although exactly how or why is still unclear.

Other explanations for the origin of music emphasise the obvious similarities between human song and language. Most of us recognise that music can communicate to us - even a wordless melody can make us feel happy or sad. Dean Falk at Florida State University in Tallahassee, US, points out that we can also often understand the emotional state of someone from the tone of their voice, even if they are speaking a language we are unfamiliar with.

Perhaps music and language both evolved out of the need for early humans to communicate their emotional state to other members of the group. Other primates often rely on grooming to connect emotionally with their peers - but at some point in our prehistory, humans began to come together in larger groups, and needed a way to broadcast their emotional state to a greater number of individuals to keep the group united.