The problem with studying the evolution of music is that it leaves no fossils. No stone flute survives from the deep past in a way that tells you whether the creature who made it experienced anything like what you feel when a melody resolves. The bones are silent. So for most of the twentieth century, researchers more or less agreed to leave the question alone. Too speculative. Too soft.
That consensus has cracked.
Henkjan Honing, a professor of Music Cognition at the University of Amsterdam, has spent two decades working on a reframe that now appears in Current Biology.1 His argument is not about music as a cultural product — the instruments, the genres, the social rituals built around sound. It is about something prior to all of that: what he calls “musicality,” the biological capacity that makes any of those cultural forms possible in the first place. The ability to perceive a beat, track pitch relationships, feel the pull of a phrase about to resolve. That. Where did it come from, and what is it made of?
The answer, Honing argues, drawing on work across psychology, neuroscience, biology, genetics, and animal cognition, is that musicality is not a single thing. It is a mosaic — what he calls a “multicomponent” capacity, assembled from older building blocks that evolution had already been refining for entirely different purposes. Perceptual systems. Motor systems. Emotional circuitry. At some point in hominin history, these were integrated in a new configuration. The result was something that, eventually, produced every musical tradition that has ever existed on earth.
