The Phylogeny of Musicality

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Music is a widespread cultural phenomenon and the biological and cognitive capacities for making and engaging with music are widely distributed among the human population. The anthropological record details the many guises in which music appears across human cultures and the roles that it plays. This includes ethnographically known forager societies in which all individuals are engaged to some extent with the musical activities of their group. From an evolutionary perspective, humans are musical creatures. This chapter sketches an evolutionary account of our species’ widely distributed musicality via various key features of hominin vocal and bodily anatomy, the ear, and cognition from a paleoanthropological perspective—features that make music production and engagement possible—as well as relevant archeological evidence.</jats:p>