Why does a chord you've never heard before make you want to cry? Why do babies respond to rhythm before they've heard a single song? Why does the same part of your brain that processes mortal danger also process musical beauty?

The answers reach back 4 million years. Musicologist Michael Spitzer walks us through the natural origins of human music and creativity.

I'm Michael Spitzer. I'm professor of music at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom. I've written a book called The Musical Human, A History of Life on Earth.

People often write books in response to reading other books, and when I read Yuval Harari's Sapiens, which blew my mind, I thought, well, hold on. Music is at least a million years older than the sapiens. And most books about music do the usual thing of which composer wrote what piece at what time. And I wanted to get away from that and see the bigger picture. We're in that kind of moment of thinking of the global, of the universal, and music is absolutely universal.…