I know near zero music history, but I was under the impression that that's the evolution from diatonic scales and eventually into our western music system.
Of course a lot of other stuff in music and music theory is due to history and tradition. For example the names of the intervals (octave, fourth, fifth etc.) presumes a 7-note scale. Using 7 as reference is tradition, e.g. the pentatonic scale has 5 notes.
That's our point.
What I meant was that the interval between a major third and fourth in a 12-tone chromatic scale has to be a semitone due to math, not due to some historical accident or decision.
It might be an accident of history that we use a 12-step scale in the first place though, since you can have arbitrary many intervals in an octave - but you can't just divide the octave in arbitrarily places and get music out of it. The intervals still have to be ratios.
(Well I'm sure some avant-garde composer have tried making music with intervals that are not ratios just to be clever, but I hope you get my point!)