Culture, Cooperation, and Communication: The Co-evolution of Hominin Cognition, Sociality, and Musicality.

This article focuses on the evolutionary origins of human musicality, proposing that it developed as a mosaic of anatomical, cognitive, social, and technological traits incrementally evolving throughout the Plio-Pleistocene hominin lineage. Drawing on the social brain framework and theories of gene-culture co-evolution and niche construction, it argues that early hominins exhibited protomusical behaviors linked to vocal communication, social bonding, and tool use, which laid the foundations for music. The article further contends that fully developed musical traditions emerged through social learning and cumulative culture, with ethnographic and archaeological evidence supporting music's deep antiquity and multifunctional social roles. It emphasizes that musicality is not a single adaptation but a complex, co-evolving suite of traits shaped by both biological and cultural processes over hundreds of thousands of years.