No progress since Darwin and Spencer?

Darwin and Spencer.

Asif Ghazanfar and Gavin Steingo open their recent Commentary in Science, by asserting that –because no fossil or archaeological record of early music-making exists– modern musicality researchers “rely as much on conjecture as they did in Darwin and Spencer’s time.” 

This characterization is inaccurate. 

The evolution of musicality can be reconstructed using methods from comparative biology, genetics, and cross-cultural analyses, empirical domains that were unavailable to Darwin and Spencer. 

Over the past twenty years, musicality research has shown that virtually all humans have a natural capacity for music (1, 2), comparable to our innate capacity for language. Examples include beat processing in human newborns (3), species-specific precursors of both rhythmic and pitch processing (4, 5), and showing cross-cultural ‘universals’ in the structural aspects of human music (6–8), suggesting a biological basis. Additionally, recent neuroscientific findings indicate that humans process speech and music through distinct — and possibly independently evolved — neural pathways (9). Together, these findings constitute a robust empirical foundation rather than conjecture and have substantially reshaped our understanding of musicality. 

While trained tapping in macaques (10)—as discussed in Ghazanfar and Steingo’s Perspective—addresses only one subcomponent of musicality, it nonetheless offers a valuable window into its evolution, particularly within the framework of the Gradual Audiomotor Evolution (GAE) hypothesis (11). This hypothesis proposes that beat perception and synchronization emerged through incremental increases in the connection between cortical and subcortical motor planning regions. Probing beat perception and isochrony perception in animals is still in its infancy, but it appears, at least within the primate lineage, that beat perception has evolved gradually, peaking in humans and present only with some limitations in chimpanzees and other non-human primates (12, 13). 

Lastly, the relevant object of inquiry here is not music per se, but musicality. For this reason, Ghazanfar and Steingo’s analogy comparing the study of music evolution to ‘human bike evolution’ is unhelpful. Riding a bike requires explicit training even in humans, whereas moving to a musical beat emerges spontaneously and effortlessly, often before the onset of language. This spontaneity is precisely what places beat perception so prominently within musicality research. In other primates, beat perception is not effortless but can be acquired through training, suggesting that for them it is analogous to bike riding in humans. As the authors note, studying trained abilities can nevertheless reveal the basic processes underlying those abilities. More generally, both spontaneous and trained behaviors in animals offer complementary insights into their evolutionary capacities: humans spontaneously acquire speech but can be trained to imitate bird calls, indicating a specialized drive for conspecific communication alongside a broader capacity for vocal imitation. Similarly, non-human primates possess timing and pattern-detection abilities that may form the evolutionary substrate from which human beat induction emerged. Overall, comparative research across cultures and across species provides a powerful framework for uncovering the biological foundations and evolutionary history of musicality. 

As a result, investigating the origins of musicality has become increasingly feasible. What was once a largely speculative corner of musicology has developed into a rapidly advancing interdisciplinary field, rich with compelling new research questions.  

Published as eLetter in Science on December 9, 2025; Written by Henkjan Honing - University of Amsterdam, NL; W. Tecumseh Fitch - University of Vienna, AT; Marisa Hoeschele - Austrian Academy of Sciences, AT; Hugo Merchant - Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, MX  

 

References

1. H. Honing, C. ten Cate, I. Peretz, S. E. Trehub, Without it no music: cognition, biology and evolution of musicality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 370, 20140088 (2015).
2. W. T. Fitch, Four principles of bio-musicology. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 370, 197–202 (2015).
3. I. Winkler, G. P. Háden, O. Ladinig, I. Sziller, H. Honing, Newborn infants detect the beat in music. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 106, 2468–71 (2009).
4. C. ten Cate, H. Honing, “Precursors of music and language in animals” in The Oxford Handbook of Language and Music, D. Sammler, Ed. (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2025; https://academic.oup.com/edited-volume/59773).
5. M. Hoeschele, H. Merchant, Y. Kikuchi, Y. Hattori, C. ten Cate, Searching for the origins of musicality across species. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 370 (2015).
6. J. H. McDermott, A. F. Schultz, E. A. Undurraga, R. A. Godoy, Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception. Nature 25, 21–25 (2016).
7. P. E. Savage, S. Brown, E. Sakai, T. E. Currie, Statistical universals reveal the structures and functions of human music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, 8987–8992 (2015).
8. N. Jacoby, E. H. Margulis, M. Clayton, E. Hannon, H. Honing, J. Iversen, T. R. Klein, S. A. Mehr, L. Pearson, I. Peretz, M. Perlman, R. Polak, A. Ravignani, P. E. Savage, G. Steingo, C. J. Stevens, L. Trainor, S. Trehub, M. Veal, M. Wald-Fuhrmann, Cross-cultural work in music cognition: Challenges, insights and recommendations. Music Percept 37, 185–195 (2020).
9. P. Albouy, L. Benjamin, B. Morillon, R. J. Zatorre, Distinct sensitivity to spectrotemporal modulation supports brain asymmetry for speech and melody. Science (1979) 367, 1043–1047 (2020).
10. V. G. Rajendran, L. Prado, J. Pablo Marquez, H. Merchant, Monkeys have rhythm. Science (1979) 390, 940–944 (2025).
11. H. Merchant, H. Honing, Are non-human primates capable of rhythmic entrainment? Evidence for the gradual audiomotor evolution hypothesis. Front Neurosci 7, 1–8 (2014).
12. H. Honing, F. L. Bouwer, L. Prado, H. Merchant, Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) sense isochrony in rhythm, but not the beat. Front Neurosci 12 (2018).
13. Y. Hattori, M. Tomonaga, Rhythmic swaying induced by sound in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 117, 936–942 (2019).

 

Can you do better than a songbird?

You are invited to participate in a scientific experiment that compares the auditory perceptions of humans & songbirds (zebra finches). You will be asked to complete an acoustic task that takes ca. 10 minutes.

Note that –like the zebra finches– you will get no explicit instruction, just some simple feedback on whether your answer is correct (smiley), incorrect (sad face), or not in time (question mark). After this you will enter the main phase of the experiment in which you are asked to simply continue responding to the sound sequences as you did before. Note that, in this final phase, you will only occasionally receive feedback.

Can you do as well, or even better than a songbird? 

The online experiment can be found here.

Precursors of music and language?

Diagrammatic representation of the comparative approach. It shows a hypothetical phylogenetic tree that illustrates the evolution of several traits that humans may share with monkeys and birds. Filled shapes represent a hypothetical trait (such as vocal learning or beat perception); open shapes indicate the absence of that trait. The position on the phylogenetic tree dates the possible evolutionary origin of such a trait. N.B. Circle: homologous trait, present in human and monkeys, originating from a shared ancestor; Square: an independently evolved trait, similar in humans and birds by convergence.

Language and music are universal human traits, raising the question for their evolutionary origin. In a recent review, co-authored with Carel ten Cate (LU), we take a comparative perspective to address that question.

In the chapter (ten Cate & Honing, in press) we examine similarities and differences between humans and non-human animals (mammals and birds) by addressing whether and which constituent cognitive components that underlie the human ability for language and music can be found in non-human animals. It first provides an introduction to the nature and meaning of vocalizations and non-vocal communicative sounds in non-human animals. Next it reviews experimental and observational evidence of animal perception of various frequency and temporal dimensions of sounds. Many animal species show perceptual and cognitive abilities to distinguish between or to generalize auditory stimuli. This includes evidence of the presence of one or more of the constituent cognitive components on which the human abilities for language and music are based, or that may have served as precursors for these components. At the same time, there are also important differences among animal species in their abilities. Hence contrasts are not limited to those between humans and other animal species.  

We conclude that the differences between humans and other species, as well as those among non-human species, might result from specific biases and the weight or priority certain species give to attending to certain features of an acoustic signal, or because different species use particular mechanisms to different degree.

ten Cate, C. & Honing.H. (2023, in press). Precursors of music and language in animals. In Sammler, D. (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Language and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: psyarxiv.com/4zxtr