The Most Peculiar Stories On How Music Crawled Into Humanity

Prefer to listen? Enjoy the full story of the history of music on Youtube

Music sits in our lives like an old friend who refuses to explain where they came from. It just shows up, humming along, tapping its foot, insisting it’s been here forever. Scientists argue, historians guess, philosophers shrug, and folklorists quietly smile because they’ve always suspected music crawled out of some wonderfully strange corner of human evolution. So let’s wander through the theories that try to pin down the moment our ancestors decided that noise should be something more than shouting at predators and rattling stones.

The first idea is wonderfully primal. Imagine a small band of early humans settling for the night, fire crackling, darkness crowding in. Lions watch from a distance. Hyenas laugh from beyond the firelight. Someone stands up, lifts a stick, and begins to thump a rhythm against a hollow log. Someone else joins in. Voices rise, rough and raw. They don’t sing to express themselves. They sing to scare everything else away. Joseph Jordania would call this the audio‑visual intimidating display. It’s not a gentle lullaby. It’s a collective roar. People stomp, shake, shout and growl in sync and suddenly the group looks larger, stronger, and far more convincing as a threat. Music, in this story, grows out of fear. Not the soft kind of fear we feel before a dentist appointment, but the existential fear of becoming a lion’s evening snack.

One can imagine how easily this might evolve into something more. Rhythm brings unity. Unity brings confidence. Confidence makes the night easier to endure. Perhaps this sense of shared danger forged a musical instinct long before anyone thought of melody. You can picture early hominids discovering that beating sticks in time feels good. That voices echo off cave walls in delightful ways. That moving together produces a strange high, a spark of energy. And this spark, over thousands of generations, becomes something far more sophisticated, though still carrying that ancient pulse under its edges.

Another path, equally curious, leads in the opposite direction. Instead of intimidation, think of tenderness. A mother holding a restless infant who refuses to sleep. She rocks. She sways. She murmurs sounds that aren’t quite words but aren’t random either. They drift gently, with rhythm from her breath, shaped by the heartbeat the baby once listened to through layers of skin and fluid. Many researchers believe music might have begun right here. In the soft glow of a fire, long before the group choruses, long before drums. Just a caregiver singing nonsense syllables in soothing patterns to calm a child.

It’s easy to imagine this growing roots. Babies recognise rhythm almost immediately. They prefer exaggerated intonation. They are drawn to repetition and melodic arcs. The human voice becomes a kind of portable cradle. As infants survive more easily when soothed and bonded, this style of vocal play strengthens. Before long, everyone in a group knows how to hum a bit, chant a bit, babble melodically. The leap from baby‑soothing to communal singing is surprisingly small. A thousand generations later, lullabies remain almost identical across continents. The soft sway, the predictable rise and fall, the whisper that communicates safety.

Now let’s take a sideways step into a theory that treats music and language as siblings rather than rivals. Picture a world where our ancestors didn’t have speech yet, but they didn’t have silence either. Instead, they produced a hybrid form of sound: rhythmic, melodic, expressive, filled with emotional nuance yet lacking specific words. Some call this musilanguage, a shared ancestor of both music and language. It’s not hard to picture. If you’ve ever listened to someone speaking in a tonal language such as Yoruba or Mandarin, you can hear the music in their speech. If you’ve ever listened to a chant with no words, you can hear the language‑like phrasing.

This theory argues that humans once communicated in melodic contours long before anyone could label a tree as a tree or a rock as a rock. A mother might announce danger with a low falling note. A young hunter might express excitement with a sharp jumping interval. Over time, these vocalisations branch. Some become more referential, specific, precise. These become speech. Others become freer, more expressive, less burdened by meaning. These become music. If this idea holds any truth, then perhaps music isn’t the strange one in the family. Perhaps language is. Perhaps music is simply what speech abandoned along the way.

Then there’s the cosmic option. Not cosmic in the sense of exploding stars and astrophysics equations, though those make their own oddly soothing sounds. Cosmic in the older sense. Pythagoras, for instance, believed the heavens operated as one grand musical instrument. Planets moved in mathematical ratios, and those ratios were identical to musical intervals. The universe, he insisted, sang. We just couldn’t hear it.

It’s a poetic thought. Humans looking at the night sky, wondering who built the rules of harmony. Later generations of astronomers didn’t fully embrace Pythagoras, but they never quite let go of him either. The idea that music reveals an underlying order remains seductive. And in the modern age, scientists who try to imagine communicating with extraterrestrial species often begin with sound. Rhythm makes sense everywhere. Mathematics makes sense everywhere. A melody might be the closest thing to a universal phrase.

Perhaps this reaches too far. Or perhaps it shows how deep our attachment to music goes. When we try to speak to the cosmos, we reach for music before words. Maybe that’s a hint that music feels fundamental, something anchored not just in human biology but in the very structure of experience. Or perhaps we simply enjoy imagining cosmic choirs because it makes the universe feel less indifferent and more like an orchestra waiting for us to join in.

Finally, let’s explore the most mischievous theory of all: the possibility that music didn’t evolve for any purpose. That it’s a delicious accident. The auditory cheesecake idea says humans evolved excellent auditory and motor systems for reasons unrelated to music: communication, coordination, recognising threats. Once these systems existed, music slid into them like cream filling. It feels satisfying not because it was necessary but because it engages the machinery we built for other things.

This means music might not carry deep evolutionary secrets. It might not help us survive lions or soothe infants in any adaptive way. It might simply be something we enjoy because our brains enjoy patterns, repetition, novelty, complexity and emotional colouring. It’s a bit like how we enjoy rollercoasters even though there was never any evolutionary need to be hurled around at high speed. We’re pattern‑hungry creatures, and music feeds us patterns in layers upon layers.

Yet calling music a by‑product feels like calling fire a by‑product of sticks rubbing together. Once something emerges, even by accident, its impact reshapes everything. For many cultures, music becomes ritual, identity, memory. It marks births, deaths, weddings, battles, harvests. A song can carry history, console grief, stoke rebellion. Perhaps its origins matter far less than its functions. A by‑product can still become the spine of human culture.

All these theories share a common thread. They acknowledge that music sits in a strange place between necessity and luxury. It doesn’t feed us. It doesn’t shelter us. It doesn’t heal a wound or light a fire. And yet no society has ever existed without it. Even the smallest communities, living with few resources, create songs. Even the most isolated groups hum, chant or drum.

The truth might be that music has many origins, not one. Imagine our ancestors on the edge of darkness, terrified and clutching sticks. They begin to signal courage through rhythm. A child whimpers, and a mother hums a calming tone. Hunters call each other with melodic phrases. The group invents more sounds, more patterns, more rhythms. As months roll into seasons and seasons into centuries, music emerges not from one single spark but from a bonfire of overlapping behaviours.

In that sense, music feels like a collage of humanity itself. Fear, comfort, curiosity, communication and accidental pleasure all woven together. The stories people now tell through music echo the very forces that shaped it. War songs still thrum with intimidation. Lullabies still sway with maternal tenderness. Popular music still borrows the tricks of speech. And orchestral music still flirts with cosmic ambition.

Perhaps the strangest part of all this is how universal music feels now. You can hear a street musician in Marrakesh, a choir in Helsinki, a jazz band in New Orleans, and something in your brain clicks in recognition. You understand the structure even if you don’t understand the culture. It’s as if music taps into something older than language and wider than geography.

So where does that leave us? Somewhere between the firelit dance, the cosmic harmony and the cheesecake metaphor. Somewhere between biology and imagination. Music may have begun as a roar in the dark or a murmur in a cradle. It may have begun as a coded chant. It may even have begun nowhere specific, simply bubbling up because humans can’t resist turning chaos into pattern.

Whatever its origins, music still carries that ancient mystery. It refuses to settle into a neat explanation. It whispers that something in us needs to create beauty out of vibration. And perhaps that, more than any theory, is the most astonishing fact. Humans heard the world rumble, crackle, hiss and howl—and decided to answer back with a song.