Musical capacity was present in Homo sapiens 135 thousand years ago: genomic lower bounds and the emergence of human musicality

Music is central to what makes us human. Yet, despite decades of research across cognitive science, archaeology, and evolutionary biology, there is no consensus on when human musicality first emerged. Musicality is the set of abilities required to perceive, produce, and appreciate music (Honing et al., 2015). Estimates for its emergence range drastically, depending on what one looks for: bone flutes appear in the archaeological record around 40 thousand years ago (kya; Conard et al., 2009). Meanwhile, theoretical models, e.g., of "musilanguage", a hypothesized ancestral communication system preceding language and music, suggest the roots of musical behavior date much further back (Brown, 2017, see also Mithen, 2006;Bannan, 2008;Fitch, 2010Fitch, , 2013)).While the exact moment musicality emerged remains elusive, recent genomic evidence allows us to establish a firm lower boundary: the latest point at which full-blown human musicality must have been present in our ancestral population, adapting the logic that Miyagawa et al. (2025) recently applied to language. Recent genetic and genomic studies of Homo sapiens lineages indicate that the first population divergence -marked today by the Khoisan lineages of Southern Africa -occurred around 135 kya (Lankheet et al., 2026;Ragsdale et al., 2023; see also the meta-analysis by Miyagawa et al., 2025). This provides a simple, but crucial heuristic. If full-fledged musicality had emerged only after this divergence, we would expect to find modern human populations that lack musicality, and/or whose musical systems lack fundamental structural elements.Yet no such population is known. Across regions and cultures, human music relies on shared perceptual and cognitive building blocks: using discrete pitch structures and scaled intervals grounded in tonal perception, alongside rhythmic entrainment and synchronized group dance grounded in metrical perception (Savage et al., 2015;Mehr, 2025). Cross-cultural comparative research suggests that while musical traditions vary, human listeners across disparate societies share core perceptual priors, such as biases toward simple integer-ratio rhythms and logarithmic pitch scales (Jacoby et al., 2019(Jacoby et al., , 2024)). The documented musical practices among Khoisan lineages, who are the deepest diverged branches in modern human genetics, similarly exhibit features depending on these foundational traits (Yende, 2024). Given the relative genetic isolation of this lineage, the vast presence of these traits indicates that the cognitive and physiological infrastructure required for musicality must have been operational prior to this ~135 kya split (though note that paleoanthropological findings point to potentially even around 300 kya; Hublin et al.,Having the biological infrastructure for musicality does not mean musical behavior appears automatically. Here, we distinguish between broad prerequisites (e.g., vocal motor control, auditory sequence processing) and full-fledged musicality; a composite trait comprising core cognitive systems for tonal and metrical perception (Honing et al., 2015;Mehr, 2025). While the underlying neurocognitive architecture must be music-ready, providing the raw biological capacity to acquire and process music (Seifert, 2018), musicality still depends on cultural environment and developmental exposure to unlock its full expression. So how far back do its building blocks extend? Genomic data establishes approximately 135 kya as a minimum date for modern Homo sapiens, but essential components of musicality and their biological prerequisites (e.g., vocal learning or cultural transmission) may have had distinct evolutionary histories, evolved gradually, and could predate our species altogether (e.g., Mithen, 2006;Clark & Henneberg, 2017;Podlipniak, 2025). The lineage split between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals occurred about 500 to 600 kya (Prüfer et al., 2014). Shared anatomical adaptations for vocal control and auditory processing (D'Anastasio, 2013;Martínez et al., 2004), alongside complex cultural transmission (Nielsen et al., 2020), indicate that hominins possessed key prerequisites for musicality prior to the >500 kya divergence.Whether these traits culminated in musical practice (e.g., Mithen, 2006;Podlipniak, 2025) or disputed artifacts like the Divje Babe bone item (Turk et al., 2018(Turk et al., , 2020;;contra: e.g., Diederich, 2015), remains unclear.Extending this phylogenetic perspective to our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos (genus Pan), reveals that several foundational components of musicalitysuch as rhythm production (Brooks et al., 2026;Hattori et al., 2026), timbre preferences (Kalan et al., 2019), potentially consonance preferences (Sugimoto et al., 2010), and joint acoustic coordination (Brooks et al., 2025) -are to some extent present in our primate kin.Alongside flexible gestural and vocal signaling (Liebal et al., 2004;Brooks et al., 2025), these shared traits reflect cognitive building blocks of human communication systems (Varella, 2023). The last common ancestor of hominines and Pan lived approximately 6-8 million years ago (mya; Coelho et al., 2026;Langergraber et al., 2012). Consequently, while full-blown musicality is found within our species, many of its key components likely rest on an ancient, shared heritage predating the Homo-Pan split.By combining genomic split-times with cross-cultural universals, we can reframe the timeline of human musicality. While ~ 135 kya represents the point by which musicality was present across our species, as we argue, its cognitive foundations are far older -a heritage that predates Homo sapiens itself.Allowing to date essential components of musicality offers fresh traction on longstanding evolutionary puzzles. For instance, a central debate in paleoanthropology concerns whether Neanderthals possessed speech (e.g., Boë et al., 2007vs. Lieberman, 2007). While vocal tract mechanics are often central to these disputes, musicality depends on a deeper suite of shared cognitive and physiological prerequisites (cf, Fitch et al., 2016): fine respiratory control, auditory sequence learning, precise sensorimotor integration, and social imitation. While our argument does not prove early hominins used acoustic communication systems, it suggests that their cognitive capacities -not just their physiology -would not have prevented them from doing so.More broadly, pushing the lower bound of human musicality back to at least ~ 135kya, and key components even further, offers two key theoretical advances to cognitive evolution. First, because music and language rely on similar foundational neurocognitive architecture (e.g., vocal motor control and auditory sequence processing; Asano et al., 2021Asano et al., , 2022;;Patel & Iversen, 2014;Rauschecker, 2014;Rauschecker & Scott, 2009;Zatorre et al., 2007), the genomic split around 135 kya holding for musicality corroborates the broader evolutionary premise for shared communicative capacities, and the proposed presence of linguistic capacity 135 kya (Miyagawa et al., 2025). Broadly, this timeline also intersects with linguistic estimates suggesting a Middle Stone Age origin for language (e.g., Perreault & Mathew, 2012). Second, musicality encompasses cognitive phenomena that language models fail to capture, such as discrete scaled pitch, octave equivalence, and rhythmic entrainment for group synchronization. Shifting the baseline for these traits from the 40 kya archaeological record to circa 135 kya provides evolutionary disciplines with a chronological anchor for modeling complex social-cognitive capacities. Material traces of prehistoric language are scarce, and archaeological evidence for abstract thought remains contested. However, because music is intrinsically bound to complex social cognition, emotional communication, and group synchronization, musicality as well as musical artifacts could act as a window into the ancestral mind.If we knew that full-blown music-readiness was locked in prior to early human population divergences, it would allow researchers across evolutionary psychology, linguistics, and anthropology to assume its underlying mechanisms were operational. We therefore suggest musicality as a foundational benchmark against which the emergence of other shared, high-level cognitive capacities, such as shared intentionality, narrative and poetic abilities, or cumulative cultural learning, can be modeled.Grounding the emergence of musicality in genomic divergence times provides a clear lower limit. While such genomic split times indicate a general baseline for specieswide cognitive infrastructure rather than a domain-specific genotype, pairing population genetics with cross-cultural universals situates human musicality to at least circa 135 kya, with building blocks likely extending past hominins to 6-8 mya.However, inferring ancestral biological capacity via present-day cross-cultural universality as a proxy for neurocognitive infrastructure requisitions caution. Beyond the genetic makeup discussed here, individual development may represent a critical interface between biology and culture (Laland et al., 2015) that may have shaped the evolution of human musicality (Patel, 2023;Savage et al., 2021). It also remains unclear how potential bio-cultural interactions during ontogeny integrate with other (co-)evolutionary factors, such as niche construction (van der Schyff & Schiavio, 2017) and inclusive inheritance.Empirically challenging this boundary offers an exciting pathway to resolve these ontogenetic uncertainties and advance our understanding of musicality. For instance, our proposed timeline would be challenged if cross-cultural research identifies a deeply diverged lineage that lacks and cannot acquire a core cognitive building block of musicality. Similarly, discovering lineage-specific divergences in developmental plasticity among modern children would indicate that the neurodevelopmental biases enabling modern musicality were not fully locked in prior to the ~ 135 kya split.Future research could further test and refine this benchmark, for instance, by also integrating paleoneurology (Asano, 2022), computational modeling (Haiduk & Popescu, 2026), paleogenomic dating of cognitive variants across hominin lineages (cf., Libedinsky et al., 2025;Zwir et al., 2022), and cross-cultural neuroimaging to clarify how musicality evolved alongside language and social cognition.Looking ahead, we suggest that musicality offers a crucial, empirical baseline for reconstructing the evolution of human mind and communication.