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As Nicholas Bannan was writing new flute music last year, he was reflecting on the flute being one of the world's oldest musical instruments.

It was not an idle historical connection, but an overlap of his latest compositions with the earliest stages in human language.

About the same time that his flute music was premiered at the 40 ^th annual convention of the USA National Flute Association in Las Vegas, Associate Professor Bannan's book , Music, Language and Human Evolution , was published by Oxford University Press.

The Professor of Music Education in the School of Music, edited the book and wrote four of the 12 chapters, contributing to and collaborating on some others.

He has been working on and fascinated by the evolution of language for 20 years.

It is clear to Professor Bannan and many of his international colleagues that music preceded language in the evolution of humans.

Until recently, archaeology had little to say about the possible role of music in human evolution, but this book builds on Charles Darwin's speculation that human language may have had its origins in forms of vocal communication closer to the sounds that we identify as music.

"A colleague of mine and one of the contributors to the book, Hollis Taylor, is studying the birdsong of the pied butcher bird, to see if their ‘dialect' changes across Australia," Professor Bannan said. "These birds mimic the sounds they hear.  A mimic is a generator of new sounds - just as a composer is. Birds' use of communication tools compares very closely with human's, which is a sound basis for believing that musical communication - like birdsong - came before the more sophisticated language."

The flute has played a big part in Professor Bannan's life, despite the fact that it is an instrument which he doesn't play. "My daughter is a flautist and I have been involved with the Perth-based Fisenden Flute Ensemble, for whom I wrote the recent music, for some years," he said.  "I am interested in the nature and function of the flute in human development.

"Some of the earliest evidence of humans making music is flutes that were made 35,000 to 40,000 years ago. My colleague, Pedro Espi-Sanchis, makes and plays seaweed flutes in the South African tradition.  He co-wrote a chapter in the evolution book with me on hunter-gatherer music.

"He picks up dried seaweed, cuts it, shapes it, then plays it. It is such a simple idea that people were probably doing this thousands of years ago.

"But the materials they used - seaweed, bamboo, leaves and parts of trees - would have rotted away, leaving no evidence for archaeologists.

"So it has been hard for the people who are interested in the evolution of language and the part that music played. They have been trying to open up this debate for 150 years.  It is a serious and significant matter and is finally taking off in many disciplines including acoustics, zoology, linguistics, psychology, child development and education."

As well as collaborating on the chapter on the history of instrument making, Professor Bannan worked with Vietnamese singer Tran Quang Hai to write a chapter on singing, including chant, as an extension of the voice.

Music, Language and Human Evolution is accompanied by a DVD so readers can hear the sounds the writers are describing.

"The final chapter is my take on Darwin's theory, partly based on my research with pre-language children," Professor Bannan said.

Winthrop Professor Alan Harvey, a neuroscientist in the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, also has a long-term interest in music and its role in human evolution, and has written several articles on the topic.