These Monkeys Hint at an Evolutionary Musical Mystery

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Yese may not be the most gifted dancer, but humans are considered particularly good at grooving spontaneously to the beat of music. The ability to move through time with a rhythm is relatively rare in the animal kingdom. This learning has long been thought to be limited to species that can imitate sounds, a feat known as complex vocal learning. The majority of non-human primates, including our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, do not possess this skill.

Today, macaque monkeys have turned that theory on its head by listening to the Backstreet Boys and other tunes. The macaques, which are not considered vocal learners, were able to synchronize their hand claps to the rhythm of several pieces of music.

This discovery offers new clues about the evolution of music. Scientists have attempted to understand the origins of music perception and creation by studying how various species respond to human-created melodies. In people, moving spontaneously to songs requires complex abilities, including detecting abstract patterns and preparing our bodies to respond to the next beat. Such skills begin to emerge in early childhood in humans. But outside of our species, only birds and sea lions have so far been shown to synchronize to the rhythms.

Now we can add macaques to this small list of non-human dancers, a recent Science study found. In a series of three experiments, two adult male macaques were trained with juice rewards to listen to several songs. According to previous research, these pieces of music had relatively easy-to-follow rhythms and tempos close to the metronome rhythms previously used to train the monkeys. Researchers at the National Autonomous University of Mexico challenged these monkeys in a variety of ways to test their tapping prowess.

In the first experiment, the scientists played three songs, then changed the tempo by half a beat, but the monkeys still kept the beat. In the second experiment, the team scrambled the songs, “destroying the rhythmic time structure,” according to the paper. During this task, the monkeys only synchronized when they heard a beat. In the final task, the macaques were rewarded for keeping a consistent beat to the Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody,” which was played at three different speeds. In this final phase, the macaques always chose to follow the original tempo of the song.

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“The observation that a trained monkey is naturally attracted to synchronizing its keystrokes to the true (human) tempo of new songs is further evidence of possible spontaneity in the perception of musical rhythm,” the authors write in the paper. Still, they recognize that macaques’ movements are not necessarily natural behaviors, like the instinctive foot tapping or swaying humans do when a catchy song comes on the radio. The monkeys needed a lot of instruction and “always found the task demanding.”

Based on these findings, the researchers suggest that the ability to groove to music among a larger number of animals stems from four types of abilities: perceiving musical patterns, predicting the next beat, timing one’s movements accordingly, and successfully putting these pieces together to obtain rewards. Now, they suggest that more species, beyond those already studied by scientists, may “show some ability to sense musical rhythm.”

“This study presents a key advance in understanding the neurobiological and evolutionary origins of musical beat perception, making the macaque a model organism,” the authors wrote.

These reluctant dancers suggest that the roots of rhythm may lie deeper in our evolutionary past than the vocal mimicry hypothesis suggests, even if they need coaxing to find their rhythm.

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Main image: Md. Tareq Aziz Touhid / Wikimedia Commons

• Molly Glick

  Published on December 1, 2025

  Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.