The auricular muscles, which enabled our distant ancestors to move their ears for better hearing, activate when people try to ...

Thought to be pretty redundant in modern humans outside of wiggling our ears for a giggle, new research has revealed that ...

If a breakdown occurs anywhere along this pathway, it is referred to as a conductive hearing loss. Certain types of ...

Vestigial ear muscles activate during focused listening, revealing a hidden link to our auditory past and evolution.

“The exact reason these became vestigial is difficult to tell, as our ancestors lost this ability about 25 million years ago, ...

To test whether humans still use auricular muscles — which once helped move our primate ancestors’ ears to funnel sound — scientists attached electrodes to the sides of people’s heads, and asked them ...

They explained that the muscles helped change the shape of the pinna, or the shell of the ear, funneling sound to the ...

Summary: Humans have vestigial ear muscles that once helped our ancestors focus on sounds. New research shows these muscles still activate when we strain to hear in noisy environments. Scientists used ...

Gills and mammalian ears bear little resemblance ... by a lack of fossil evidence when trying to pinpoint the time of pinna evolution, they can tap into the wealth of genomic data on present ...

They explained that the muscles helped change the shape of the pinna, or the shell of the ear, funneling sound to the eardrums. Millions of years ago, our ancestors stopped using them, so humans ...