Macaques can tap along to a musical beat, according to a new study – findings that upend the assumption that only animals with vocal-learning abilities can find and move to a groove. According to the authors, the discovery offers fresh insights that suggest the roots of rhythm may run far deeper in our evolutionary past than previously believed. Humans have a unique ability to perceive and move in time to a steady musical beat. It is a skill that develops early in life and requires complex pattern recognition, prediction, and motor coordination. Outside of humans, the ability to synchronize movement to rhythm – isochronicity – is strikingly rare in the animal kingdom and has only been observed in some birds and exceptional individuals of other species, leaving a gap in our understanding of its evolutionary and neurobiological roots. One powerful leading theory, the vocal-learning hypothesis, suggests that rhythmic synchronization depends on specialized brain circuits that tightly link hearing and movement, which evolved to support complex vocal learning. However, previous research shows that macaques, despite not being vocal learners, can be trained to synchronize their taps predictively with metronome beats, hinting at the neural dynamics required for isochronicity.

In this study, Vani Rajendran and colleagues investigated whether macaques trained to synchronize their taps with metronome beats could extend their metronome-tapping skills to real music in all its acoustic complexity. Rajendran et al. observed that two metronome-trained macaques independently initiated experimental trials in which they heard one of three human-selected songs and were rewarded when they tapped in time to each song’s tempo. Remarkably, both animals developed consistent tapping rhythms across all songs, and when the authors shifted the music’s tempo, the macaques’ tapping phases shifted as well, demonstrating that they were synchronizing to musical structure rather than responding reflexively to experimental cues. This behavior was observed even when the monkeys were presented with a song they had not yet heard before and when they were no longer rewarded for tapping to the beat. According to the authors, the findings suggest that, although monkeys do not experience music as fully as humans do and require substantial training, beat perception may span a broader evolutionary continuum than previously believed; it is not just restricted to vocal-learning species. “Rajendran et al. are careful to note that the abilities they observed are not natural behaviors: They were conditioned through extrinsic rewards, not the seemingly intrinsic ones that humans experience when they follow rhythmic beats,” write Asif Ghazanfar and Gavin Steingo in a related Perspective that highlights the study’s caveats. “A behavior that has been conditioned may not be equivalent to a behavior that emerges spontaneously.”

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The domestic cat may be a far more recent arrival to Europe than previously thought, arriving roughly 2000 years ago and not because of the Paleolithic expansion of Near East farmers. The findings offer new insight into one of humanity’s most enigmatic animal companions and identify North Africa as the cradle of the modern housecat. The domestic cat has a long and complex, albeit uncertain, history. Genetic studies show that all modern cats descended from the African wildcat, which is found today in North Africa and the Near East. However, sparse archaeological remains and the difficulty of distinguishing domestic from wild felines based on bones alone have left major gaps in our understanding of the origin and spread of early domestic cats. A human-cat burial from ~7500 BCE in Cyprus suggests an early domestication in the Levant region, while later Egyptian art and animal burials point to a possible later origin in Pharaonic Egypt. Recent Genetic studies of ancient DNA have indicated that cats may have dispersed from what is now Türkiye into Europe alongside Neolithic farmers, supporting the idea that cat domestication began in the Levant during the rise of agriculture ~6,000 years ago. However, it remains unclear whether these animals were truly domesticated cats or a distinct lineage of wildcats.

To help resolve some of these mysteries, Marco de Martino and colleagues conducted paleogenomic analyses on 87 ancient and modern cat genomes. De Martino et al. generated 70 low-coverage genomes from archaeological specimens spanning more than 10,000 years (~9000 BCE to 19^th Century CE) and 17 higher-coverage genomes from modern and museum wildcats from Europe, North Africa, and Anatolia. Contrary to previous studies, the authors found that domestic cats most likely originated from North African wildcats, rather than from the Levant, and that true domestic cats only appeared in Europe and southwest Asia several thousand years after the Neolithic. Earlier cats in Europe and Türkiye were genetically European wildcats and reflect ancient hybridization rather than early domestication. After being introduced, North African domestic cats spread rapidly throughout Europe, often following Roman military routes, reaching Britain by the 1^st Century CE. What’s more, de Martino et al. show that Sardinian wildcats – both ancient and modern – are more closely related to North African wildcats than domestic cats, indicating that humans brought wildcats to islands where they did not naturally occur, and they are not descendants of a feral population of early domestic cats. “The study by de Martino et al. is part of an ongoing project, Project Felix, which also aims to tackle other outstanding questions concerning cat domestication,” writes Jonathan Losos in a related Perspective. “Ever sphinxlike, cats give up their secrets grudgingly.”

When gene transcription falls out of sync with other biological processes, that dysfunction can contribute to aging, cancer and other diseases. Researchers revealed how key regulatory proteins work in a precise hierarchy to meticulously adjust pacing during transcription. These regulatory proteins may now emerge as potential drug targets for a variety of disorders. The single-molecule platform that revealed these findings is a novel approach to studying similar processes that could have broad applications in biology.