William McNeill, Keeping Together in Time:  Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)
 

Concept/argument:

"Muscular Bonding" (p. 2):  "the euphoric fellow feeling that prolonged and rhythmic muscular movement arouses among nearly all participants in such exercises."

• Corollaries (or derivative arguments) that apply to history (p. 3):

• "First, throughout recorded history, moving and singing together made collective tasks far more efficient."  [pyramids, warfare, religion, even trade]
• "Second, ... long before written records allowed us to know anything precise about human behavior, keeping together in time became important for human evolution, allowing early human groups to increase their size, enhance their cohesion, and assure survival by improving their success in guarding territotry, securing food, and nurturing their young."

Key point:  Human response to music is visceral and corporeal, as well as conscious and emotional.  It affects our very bodies.  Read "Exploring the Musical Brain", a recent article in this year's Scientific American.
 

Music, rhythm, and dance facilitated a group cohesion that probably predated formal language and was crucial for family, group, band, clan, tribe, chiefdom, and state success in competition with other families, groups, bands, clans, tribes, chiefdoms, and states.

Music, rhythm, and dance, by destroying boundaries, helps turn warriors into soldiers...

• Subhuza II, Swazi king in 1940s (p. 8):  "The warriors dance and sing at the Incwala [an annual festival] so that they do not fight, although they are many and from all parts of the country and proud."  When they dance they feel they are one and they can praise each other."

...prepares men for battle...

• Antonio Herrara, 1519, Tenochtitlan (p. 104): "That night more than a thousand knights got together in the temple, with great loud sounds of drums, shrill trumpets, cornets and notched bones....  They danced nude ... in a circle, holding their hands, in rows and keeping time to the tune of the musicians and singers."

... counters fatigue, and facilitates development of endurance and extends warmaking capacity...

• Maurice de Saxe, Marshal of France, d. 1750 (p. 9):  "Have them march in cadence.  There is the whole secret, and it is the military step of the Romans....  Everyone has seen people dancing all night.  But take a man and make him dance for a quarter of an hour without music and see if he can bear it....  Movement to music is natural and automatic.  I have often noticed while the drums were beating for the colors, that all the soldiers marched in cadence without intention and without realizing it.  Nature and instinct did it for them."

... to the point where the playful aspects of the dance and the military utility of the game become indistinguishable...

• Tacitus, on ancient Germans (p. 102):  "Naked youths, who practice the sport, bound in the dance amid swords and lances that threaten their lives.  Experience gives them skill, and skill again gives them grace; profit and pay are out of the question; however reckless their pastime, its reward is the pleasure of the spectators."