Recent research has shown that humans, songbirds and whales share a common musical instinct; namely that their instinctive awareness of scale and rhythm have too many similarities to casually discount; which suggests that music evolved in a distant common ancestor, and is much older than language. Which is very interesting; given the similarities between music and language (i.e., the fact that Western tonal music at least can be defined by a generative grammar, a formalism traditionally used for language), can the ancient musical instinct have been what the human language instinct evolved out of? Can instinctive awareness of grammatical structure in language (a universally and uniquely human trait) have originated as a mutation of instinctive awareness of musical structure?

(In that case, do any other primates, who share a relatively recent common ancestor to humanity, have anything resembling music or song, or would the instinct have either atrophied in all non-human primates, have been latent for some time? Or would it be not so much a musical instinct as something deeper, of which music is one possible manifestation?)

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