Vestigial human ear muscles react to sounds even if the external ear does not move. This could be used to build better earing aids. If you hear something interesting, you might prick up your ears.

Most people never think twice about their ears, until they catch a strange little twitch they can't explain. It might happen after a sudden noise or while trying to focus on a distant sound. These ...

Evolution has left humans with many vestigial traits—remnants of once-useful biological features that serve little or no modern purpose. One such example is the muscles around our ears, which in many ...

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The muscles that enable modern humans to wiggle their ears likely had a more important job in our ...

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Francesca has an MSci in Biochemistry from the University of Birmingham.View full profile Francesca has an MSci in Biochemistry from the University of Birmingham. Thought to be pretty redundant in ...

When people are trying hard to listen to something, the body seems to do its best to "prick up its ears," even though this ability was lost by our evolutionary ancestors millions of years ago. That's ...

If you hear something interesting, you might prick up your ears. That's a figurative expression, of course. People's ears don't actually move upward. But NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce found that this old ...