To: rwsussma@artsci.wustl.edu Subject: Man the Dancer Dear Professor Sussman,
I have just come across your book _Man the Hunted_ as I am teaching anthropology in Wayne County Community College District based on my graduate work forty years ago. I am so gratified to have your thesis thoroughly debunking the Man the Hunter and savage myth.
Before seeing your section on Man the Dancer, I had been hypothesizing , seriously, that language most like originated as dance, or body language for the reason that, as you know better than I, vision was long the primary sense of primates before the genus homo. Why would our symboling faculty arise first using the sense of hearing instead of sight ?
So, before the vocal organs, humans most likely had a whole alphabet based in not only hand made symbols , but motions from every part of the body, certainly including legs, many postures, i.e. HuMan the Dancer, is a likely candidate for the original human especially given language and culture define our species origin. As to language in the medium of sound, early "music" was most likely invented before the vocal chords evolved, don't you think ? tap tap tap tappity tappity tappity, whistle whistle whostle, using dozens of original instruments,sound makers. All they needed was the concept of symbol as an arbitrary representation and binary opposition.
I think human society originates in dancing and singing, and I'm not kidding. Especially, since differential fertility is more important than differential mortality in determining fitness. Thanks for your work. Charles Brown ba '72 ma '75 ethnology University of Michigan Detroit, Michigan
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