Group dancing as the evolutionary origin of rhythmic entrainment in humans

An ecologically-valid approach to the evolutionary origins of rhythmic entrainment in humans has to address not one but two key issues: first, the capacity to generate acoustic rhythms, and second, the ability to entrain body movements to them. Most research in this area has ignored the first issue altogether and has instead placed all of the emphasis on motor entrainment skills per se. But this begs the question of how auditory rhythms came to be generated in the first place. I discuss evolutionary models that explicitly link the mechanisms of body entrainment to the mechanisms of sound generation. The most plausible models are those in which these processes occur interactively and mutually through group dancing, employing not only visual and haptic cues for entrainment but percussive sounds generated through body movements, most especially locomotor movements. Body percussion during movement creates a link between motor and sensory components of interpersonal entrainment.