In today’s world of narrow professionalism, it is easy to get trapped within the box of our own discipline and career-making and forget that innovative thinking develops in the realm of open, borderless inquiry. As a child I was fascinated by medicine and history, and I dreamt of being an archaeologist. However, due to the pressure of my parents, I became an ethnomusicologist. It was this disadvantage that kept me out of the professional musicological loop, which allowed me to cross into other fields of knowledge. I realize that no aspect of human behaviour can be fully understood in isolation. Music and singing are no exceptions.

Curiosity creates inspiration for knowledge. Some years ago, I noticed that the Svan people of Georgia, my home country, did not have any love songs in their musical culture. I started wondering about the reasons behind this: why do people need to sing about love or erotic feelings? Why do some cultures not have love songs in their repertoires? Does everyone experience romantic love? What about animals? How did humans express their sexual feelings in early evolution and prehistory? What do our modern feelings and behaviours tell us about our past? How have we changed since the times when the first homo sapiens walked the earth?

The Origins of the Love Song: Sexual Selection or Sexual Frustration? interprets the overwhelming presence of romantic love and the love song in human societies, not as a sign of the naturalness of pair-bonding and romantic love, as similar book titles have suggested so far, but as a sign of human obsession and frustration with sexuality that is caused by culturally-imposed restrictions. Accordingly, the absence of the love song and romantic love in many sexually permissive foraging cultures indicates that romantic love is a later development – a product of sexual restrictions and ensuing frustrations rather than a product of our natural sexual selection.

Underpinned by studies in music, anthropology, evolutionary psychology, paleoarchaeology and paleoanthropology, my book tests the idea that the evolution of human culture made it possible to invent and reinforce behaviours not characteristic of early humans. Modern human sexuality, with its romantic love and erotic obsessions are a product of cultural inventions and modifications, as well as sexual obstacles and taboos. And they don’t come to us naturally. We were not always inclined to be in love with one special person. We were not always shameful and secretive about sex. We did not always sing love songs. While culture might drive humanity, not everything that is created by culture is natural to humans.

The book argues that, in prehistory and early evolution, humans might have practiced more inclusive, multiple-partner sexual relations. Why would such multiple-partner sexual relations be useful to early humans? Through the exploration of various foraging cultures and the behaviour of other species, the book demonstrates that shared sexual partners increase inclusiveness and long-term fitness of a group, reinforcing the group coordination that is so essential to the human species and their survival. Let us also remember that sex on earth did not evolve for reproduction. It is a known fact that the original role of the sexes was genetic exchange for the physical survival of microorganisms, not just reproduction! Perhaps this role of sex still exists. Based the sexual behaviour of humans and other social species, the book proposes the novel idea that sex may have evolved from social cooperation.

Nino Tsitsishvili is an evolutionary musicologist at the University of Melbourne. She has authored one book and 24 scholarly articles and chapters, in addition to editing one volume. Her article “A Historical Examination of the Links Between Georgian Polyphony and Central Asian-Transcaucasian Monophony” (2010) analyses musical styles, archaeological cultures, and physical anthropology in a comparative multidisciplinary approach to show the influx of a new population and with it, new musical system into the autochthonous population of the east Caucasus. Her research interests include the evolutionary origins of human sexual behaviour.

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