About the evolution of musicality, rhythm, and dancing

Amazing stuff!

"More than a hundred years ago, Charles Darwin’s ideas about the evolution of music were pitted against those of the sociologist Herbert Spencer . 

Darwin believed that the ability to make music evolved as a trait with adaptive value across different animal groups before the advent of contemporary humans, whereas Spencer believed that only humans can make true music.

Adaptive explanations for the evolution of human music still abound. In the absence of compelling fossil or archaeological evidence of music making, however, 21st century researchers rely as much on conjecture as they did in Darwin and Spencer’s time. ...

Do the findings of Rajendran et al. falsify the vocal-learning hypothesis by showing that a nonvocal learner can synchronize its motor responses to a musical beat and do this at different tempos? Rejecting the vocal-learning hypothesis would mean accepting that there is no mediation (neurobiological or otherwise) between vocal learning and beat processing.

However, rhythmically inclined monkeys and parrots are performing in a captive context and would not have the opportunity to learn such behaviors in their respective habitats. Rajendran et al. are careful to note that the abilities that were observed are not natural behaviors: They were conditioned through extrinsic rewards, not the seemingly intrinsic ones that humans experience when they follow rhythmic beats. A behavior that has been conditioned may not be equivalent to a behavior that emerges spontaneously. ..."

From the editor's summary and abstract:

"Editor’s summary

Musicality and especially moving to a beat—i.e., dancing—is a fundamental human trait. 

Very few other species have been found to do this, and all of these species are vocal learners, leading to the conclusion that such a tendency is reserved for species with this ability.

Notably, most nonhuman [???] primates are not vocal learners, leading to an evolutionary conundrum with regard to when our own ancestors may have begun to dance. Rajendran et al. now show that macaques are capable of synchronizing taps to a real musical beat and choose to do so spontaneously ...

Abstract

Synchronizing movements to music is a hallmark of human culture, but its evolutionary and neurobiological origins remain unknown.

This ability requires

(i) extracting a steady rhythmic pulse, or beat, out of continuous sounds;

(ii) projecting this pattern forward in time; and

(iii) timing motor commands to anticipate future beats.

Here, we demonstrate that macaques can synchronize to a subjective beat in real music and even spontaneously do so over alternative strategies.

This contradicts the influential “vocal-learning hypothesis” that musical beat synchronization is privileged to species with complex learned vocalizations.

We propose an alternative view of musical beat perception and synchronization as a continuum onto which different species can be mapped based on their capacity to coordinate the general abilities listed above through association with reward."

In Science Journals | Science

Groove to the music "What can tapping macaques reveal about the evolution of musicality?"

Monkeys have rhythm (open access)

Fig. 1. Macaques synchronize their taps to music.