A growing range of scholars across the sciences and humanities are theorizing that the human capacity for music has been shaped over evolutionary time by an interplay between cultural invention and biological evolution (gene-culture coevolution). In this presentation I will apply this theoretical framework to the human capacity to synchronize movements to an auditory beat perceived in complex rhythmic patterns. I will present a hypothesis which argues that 1) an advanced form of vocal learning acted as a preadaptation for sporadic beat perception and synchronization, providing intrinsic rewards for predicting the temporal structure of complex acoustic sequences; and 2) in humans, mechanisms of gene-culture coevolution transformed this preadaptation into a genuine neural adaptation for sustained beat perception and synchronization. The larger significance of this proposal is that it outlines a hypothesis of cognitive gene-culture coevolution which makes testable predictions for neuroscience, cross-species studies, and genetics.