Social dancing and singing lullabies to babies are not innate human behaviors

Music, movement, and the soothing hum of a lullaby are often seen as cornerstones of humanity. From bustling cities to remote villages, we expect every culture to dance in joy and sing to its children.

But the Northern Aché of Paraguay challenge that belief. These acts seem deeply human – automatic, perhaps even biological. But what if they aren’t?

A study published in the journal Current Biology by anthropologists Manvir Singh and Kim Hill asks us to reconsider this belief.

Drawing on over four decades of immersive research among the Northern Aché of Paraguay, the authors report a striking absence. This Indigenous group sings, yes – but they do not dance. And they do not sing to their babies.

This revelation disrupts long-standing theories about music as an evolutionary universal. Instead, it points to a more fragile reality: these traditions may be cultural inventions, and may be vulnerable to loss.

Northern Aché don’t dance or sing lullabies

The Northern Aché, a once-isolated hunter-gatherer society in eastern Paraguay, have lived outside the influence of global norms for much of modern history.

Hill, a professor at Arizona State University, first began working with them in 1977. He would go on to spend 122 months – more than ten years – living alongside Aché families in forest camps and settlements.

During these years, Hill documented their daily life in extraordinary detail. He observed songs sung around campfires, flutes played in solitude, and expressions of grief and celebration. But never once did he witness coordinated dance. Nor did he hear an infant-directed song.

“Aside from church singing introduced by missionaries, Northern Aché adults sing alone and in a limited number of contexts,” Singh explained. “As far as we can tell, anthropologists have never observed dancing or infant-directed song among the Northern Aché.”

Every culture sings, but not to infants?

The Northern Aché’s musical life is real, but restrained. Men sing short bursts of melody about hunting and communal affairs.

Women sing more rarely, almost always about lost relatives. Children may imitate these songs, but there is no singing aimed at babies – none of the structured soothing sounds that we associate with lullabies.

This lack isn’t due to neglect. Parents calm fussy babies with smiles, tickles, and playful talk. Yet even during long forest treks – where infants remain close to their mothers nearly all day – Hill and fellow researchers never encountered lullabies.

“It’s not that the Northern Aché don’t have any need for lullabies,” Singh said. “Aché parents still calm fussy infants. They use playful speech, funny faces, smiling and giggling.”

This distinction matters. It shows that caregiving persists even in the absence of what many view as essential, universal tools.

Cultural loss, not natural absence

Why are dance and infant-directed song missing from this society? The answer lies not in biology but in history.

The Northern Aché endured significant upheaval in the twentieth century. Their population plummeted due to disease and forced migration.

By 1970, only 338 individuals remained. With that decline came a shrinking of cultural practices. Alongside dance and lullabies, they lost other cultural practices, such as fire-making, puberty ceremonies, hunting magic, and more.

“It does mean, however, that cultural transmission matters much more for maintaining those behaviors than many researchers, including myself, have suspected,” Singh said.

Unlike smiling, which appears across cultures without instruction, these behaviors vanish without teaching and memory. They are not spontaneous instincts. They are carefully maintained traditions.

Singing and dancing are cultural creations

The Northern Aché belong to a wider language family – Tupi – which includes other groups with robust musical and ritual traditions.

Southern Aché communities, for example, have been seen dancing and singing in synchrony after contact. Tupi-speaking Araweté and Guarani peoples also have lullabies and dance music. This suggests that the ancestors of the Northern Aché once shared these practices.

But over generations, population bottlenecks and isolation stripped away many layers of cultural complexity.

They no longer make fire. They do not play stringed instruments. Their musical styles have narrowed. What remains is deeply individual, and hauntingly sparse.

Genetic studies support this story. The Northern Aché have less genetic diversity than their linguistic relatives, pointing to one or more historic population collapses. Such bottlenecks reduce not just biological variation but cultural content as well.

Human behavior shaped by culture

Theories about music’s origin often assume a biological basis. Dance and lullabies are believed to build bonds – between groups, and between mothers and babies. Many researchers have treated them as evolutionary adaptations.

“Dance and infant-related song are widely considered universal, a view that has been supported by cross-cultural research, including my own,” Singh noted.

But this study suggests a different picture. It argues that these behaviors are more like fire-making than smiling. They are useful but not inevitable. They must be invented, preserved, and passed on. When communities shrink or break, those transmissions can fail.

This idea doesn’t disprove genetic readiness. Instead, it highlights that readiness alone isn’t enough. Cultural continuity sustains human behavior.

Significance of the Northern Aché

The absence of dance and lullabies in the Northern Aché people doesn’t mean these behaviors are unimportant. It means we must reconsider what makes them possible. We need to look beyond cross-cultural surveys and explore histories of loss, isolation, and transformation.

Singh and Hill’s work shows the value of deep, long-term ethnography. Their observations emerged not from brief visits but from living as neighbors, sharing fires, and listening over decades.

“I found his observations totally fascinating and hugely important and urged him to publish them,” Singh said of Hill’s work. “He wasn’t sure how to report them, so we ended up writing the manuscript together.”

In an increasingly globalized world, such quiet exceptions are rare. But they carry powerful messages. They remind us that humanity’s most cherished expressions – music, dance, the lullaby – are not just natural responses.

Singing and dancing are cultural creations that are fragile and resilient, shaped by memory and community. And when they fall silent, they speak volumes.

The study is published in the journal Current Biology.

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