This wasn’t always a mystery. If you had the misfortune of being a human being more than 10,000 years ago, there’s a decent chance you were intimately aware of what a saber-tooth cat sounded like.

Modern pantherine cats—such as leopards, tigers and lions—can roar because of a very specialized setup of small throat bones and ligaments that form part of their larynx, or voicebox. Now ...