Fossil ear bones reveal shift in human hearing

• Autores: Sam Wong
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3041, 2015, pág. 9
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • A reconstruction of fossil ear bones has found that human hearing shifted towards picking up frequencies useful in speech very early in humans' evolution. Rolf Quam of Binghamton University in New York and his colleagues studied skulls and ear bones from Australopithecus africanus and Paranthropus robustus, which lived between 1 million and 3 million years ago, as well as those of modern humans and chimps. Using CT scans, they built 3D models of the ears of each species. Then they used chimp and human anatomical data to work out what frequencies these ears could pick up.