Monkey Drumming Is Not Music

Evolutionary scientists claim
to have found the “building
blocks of human musicality”

 

Musing Monkey’s Musical Abilities: 
Drumming Up More Stories to the Evolution Song

by Dr. Sarah Buckland-Reynolds 

A recent article by Vesta Eleuteri and team, published in Cell Press (Current Biology), struck a sharp chord, claiming to have uncovered the “first systematic evidence” that chimpanzees are able to drum in “non-random” fashion, “…show[ing] key elements of human musical rhythm”.

Among the discoveries was that Western and Eastern chimpanzees use distinct rhythms; similar to how different people groups have distinct musical signatures and genres. In a bold declaration, the authors asserted that “…drumming in our ape relatives contributes to understanding the evolutionary origins of human rhythmic percussion”.  

While the discovery of similar musical behaviors between chimps and humans may drum up attention, is it really a crescendo piece for evolutionary theory?  

Evolving Musical Complexity: Fallacious Inferences Falling Flat

The authors performed several statistical tests analyzing 371 drumming bouts from 11 chimpanzee communities to substantiate their conclusion that chimpanzees possess the skills of making non-random beats akin to human music. They not only found that there was structure in the beats (non-random timing) but also the frequencies of the intervals between beats (isochrony) also suggested order. Quoting from the article: 

 “…wild chimpanzees drum with non-random timing and isochrony, providing evidence that rhythmic drumming on instrumental substrates may have been present in our last common ancestor. Furthermore, we found subspecies-level regional rhythmic variation, showing that western chimpanzees drum isochronously, while eastern chimpanzees drum by alternating shorter and longer inter-hit intervals…. suggesting that rhythmic percussion on instrumental substrates might have been present before humans and chimpanzees diverged approximately 7–9 mya…percussive behavior in non-human apes as a promising system for exploring the evolution of musicality.” 

These musical behaviors were also nuanced based on whether the chimpanzee was resting, or traveling, and served as communication mechanisms. 

While the authors attempted to make the case that these nuances presented evidence of pre-hominid music bolstering the story of evolutionary ancestry, the glaring question remains: How could random evolutionary processes develop non-random communicative abilities? 

What is Required for Isochrony in Music? 

While a National Geographic commentary on the new findings admits the superiority in human musical adaptability over chimpanzee rhythms, there are fundamental requirements for the development of isochrony that are unexplainable by evolutionary theory. Among these include:  

Temporal Processing: Evolutionary mechanisms cannot account for how chimps would have evolved accurate detection of timing intervals between beats and the ability to predict the next beat’s arrival.

Motor Coordination: Drumming at regular intervals not only requires a developed neural network, maintaining a steady rhythm involves fine-tuned coordination between auditory perception and movement. 

Beat Perception and Prediction: Chimps behavior appears to signal awareness and an ability to recognize and anticipate future beats.  

Working Memory: Evolutionary mechanisms would not be able to account for chimps’ memories being created. Just as CPUs, RAM, and ROMs did not come about by chance, can we reasonably believe that chimpanzees’ working memory evolved purely through random evolutionary processes?

 

In addition to all these mechanisms that would be required for chimpanzees to have evolved their drumming abilities, the authors found even more remarkable skills that remain unexplainable by evolution:  

“Chimpanzees… selecting buttresses for their resonating properties”.   

This demonstrates a high level of environmental awareness, functioning physical senses, and decision-making abilities – all of which point to intelligent design, not evolution. 

More Darwinian Dissonance? 

The tune of this discovery, suggesting the evolution of musicality, seems to disagree with a recently published hypothesis that bipedalism was crucial to the development of music in humans. Larsson and Falk’s article published in The University of Chicago Press Current Anthropology in April 2025 suggested that musicality arose after bipedalism, as a consequence of human locomotion (also see: CEH’s previous reflection on the story). In the words of the authors:  

Grok/AI

“We hypothesize that auditory and motor entrainment evolved in early hominin fetuses in direct response to their mothers’ bipedal footsteps and, later, contributed to the evolution of music and language via two related processes. First, selection for bipedalism transformed feet from grasping into weight-bearing organs, which negatively affected infants’ ability to cling to their mothers, provoking the emergence of novel affective vocal exchanges between mothers and infants that became building blocks for the emergence of motherese. Second, the derived ability to entrain movements to sound was incorporated during the prehistoric emergence of wide-ranging rhythmic behaviors such as synchronized chanting of onlexical vocables and coordinated rhythmic clapping and stomping, which became instrumental during the more recent evolution of music.” 

Divergent stories of the origin of musicality further underscore that there is a clear disconnection between evidence and interpretations underpinning evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory does not provide a robust framework from which mechanisms could be derived to enable the development of musical ability or for coherently interpreting related observations. 

Disrupting the Humdrum of Evolutionary Thought 

The authors conclude on an evolutionary monotone that “our findings highlight percussive behavior in non-human apes as a promising system for exploring the evolution of musicality.” 

While the story of drumming chimps is sure to grab attention, the Darwinian camp will forever find that the evolutionary theory is insufficient to explain such marvels in our created world. 

Meanwhile, as chimpanzee drumming disrupts evolutionary humdrums, each new discovery reveals more of the marvels of praise that wild animals offer to the Lord. As Psalm 148:7,10, and 13 state: 

“Praise the Lord from the earth, 
  you great sea creatures and all ocean depths, 
wild animals and all cattle, 
   small creatures and flying birds, 
… Let them praise the name of the Lord, 
    for his name alone is exalted; 
    his splendor is above the earth and the heavens.” (New International Version)

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Update by Editor, 27 May 2025: Another evolutionist is claiming that human music and language evolved from ape antics:

What the hidden rhythms of orangutan calls can tell us about language – new research (The Conversation, 27 May 2025): Chiara De Gregorio, a postdoc research fellow at Warwick University, looks to orangutans for inspiration for writing science. Using the e-word 8 times, she emits “strange and haunting sounds” to communicate her fitness:

Those noises are the calls of Sumatran orangutans (Pongo abelii), used to warn others about the presence of predators. Orangutans belong to our animal family – we’re both great apes. That means we share a common ancestor – a species that lived millions of years ago, from which we both evolved.

Like us, orangutans have hands that can grasp, they use tools and can learn new things. We share about 97% of our DNA with orangutans, which means many parts of our bodies and brains work in similar ways.

That’s why studying orangutans can also help us understand more about how humans evolved, especially when it comes to things like communication, intelligence and the roots of language and rhythm.

If the evolutionary theory Dr De Gregorio relies on were true, it would mean her science writing is merely her way of advertising her prospects for mating and passing on her selfish genes. This includes confibulating, since the latest science confirms the 97% similarity of DNA claim to be a myth (Evolution News). It’s actually more like 85%, implying many millions of genetic differences—far, far too many to happen by mutation and be “selected” blindly in the time available.

This update inserted by David Coppedge 27 May 2025.

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Dr. Sarah Buckland-Reynolds is a Christian, Jamaican, Environmental Science researcher, and journal associate editor. She holds the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Geography from the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona with high commendation, and a postgraduate specialization in Geomatics at the Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia. The quality of her research activity in Environmental Science has been recognized by various awards including the 2024 Editor’s Award from the American Meteorological Society for her reviewing service in the Weather, Climate and Society Journal, the 2023 L’Oreal/UNESCO Women in Science Caribbean Award, the 2023 ICETEX International Experts Exchange Award for study in Colombia. and with her PhD research in drought management also being shortlisted in the top 10 globally for the 2023 Allianz Climate Risk Award by Munich Re Insurance, Germany. Motivated by her faith in God and zeal to positively influence society, Dr. Buckland-Reynolds is also the founder and Principal Director of Chosen to G.L.O.W. Ministries, a Jamaican charitable organization which seeks to amplify the Christian voice in the public sphere and equip more youths to know how to defend their faith.