Australia Teaches The World To Sing.
Not only are we teaching the world how to act, courtesy of all the stellar Australian actors and actresses in Hollywood, but now there is strong evidence Australian birds taught the world how to sing.
In Aussie Home To Music Makers, page 23 of the February 12 print edition of The West Australian newspaper, in an article credited as originating from The Age, Museum Victoria’s Head of Sciences reveals the evidence.
A search of both newspaper websites has not indicated the story is in their online editions, so I will quote the whole article instead of hyperlinking to it.
From the beautiful song of the nightingale to the raspy caw of the crow, the songlines reach back to Australia where half the world’s birds evolved from, a Victorian scientist says.
Songbirds, which include most of the well known bird species, were thought to have emerged in the northern hemisphere before spreading south.
But Museum Victoria’s head of sciences, Les Christidis, said he had proved that Australia was the songbird cradle.
With help from Swedish scientists, Dr Christidis studied the DNA sequences of modern songbirds all over the world and found they had common ancestors in Australian songbirds.
“The branching pattern shows the oldest of the songbirds is actually the lyrebird,” he said.
Songbirds, also known as passerines, then spread to the rest of the world about 60–80 million years ago, around the time the supercontinent Gondwana was breaking up into Australasia, South America, Africa, Antarctica and India.
The ancestors of songbirds were isolated in Australia.
They had since evolved into some of the world’s most beautiful and beloved bird species, including nightingales, canaries and birds of paradise.
Another vital piece of evidence was the discovery that three small, plain-looking species of New Zealand wrens, which were similarly isolated, had similar DNA sequences to Australian songbirds. Australia has 300 species of songbirds.
“Apart from pigeons, parrots and birds of prey, most birds are songbirds,” Dr Christidis said.
But Australia had ignored funding for natural history research.
Perhaps the Swedish government will fund and do all our research for us? There is a theory that human beings learned to sing by listening to bird song.
9:58:55 AM 
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