[evv555]

I lean towards the "convergent evolution" explanations of perennial philosophies as well. However paleolithic humans have also gone through geographical and population bottlenecks. If there are convergent features in culture you would expect them to also be the ones highly conserved after going through such a bottleneck. I don't draw the same conclusions as the author but the idea of paleolithic story telling as being an ancient memory preservation mechanism is compelling.

[underlipton]

Music even more so. It's said that common emotional responses to certain features of music are culturally-mediated, but it's also weird how consistently certain features tend to elicit certain emotions. There could be a physiological basis, but that conflicts with the aforementioned, and anyway, it's not as consistent as, say, a reflex.

If I may succumb to romance for a moment:

"And a song someone sings, once upon a December."

Song as figurative memetic psychopomp, an automatic but not autonomic function to transmit ideas.