how come we cant control the direction of our hearing like some animals?

Question

we may have once had that ability so why did we lose it and what advantage did we gain in its place?

Answer 1

Directional hearing is primary a trait for predators. Wolves, cats, bats, and other predators often hunt via hearing. Tracking prey is more important than avoid a sound.

Prey animals often use hearing as a defensive adaptation. Deer, rodents, primate etc. typically have ears wide on the head and facing outwards. This allows better all-round hearing and permits stereo-scopic determining of direction. Even though dogs and cats have a better sense of hearing, it takes them far longer to determine the direction of a sudden sound. Humans instinctively look towards the direction of an unusual noise.

Primates are a strange brew. They are both predators and prey animals. However, most species focus vision for hunting and sound for protection. Our ancestors likely spend more time eating insects, nuts, grasses, and fruits than hunting mice. Thus, vision is more important in finding food. Even now, we hunt primarily with vision. Fruit eating also requires color vision which many pretators do not have. Meanwhile most monkeys, apes, etc. rely primarily on sound as as defensive mechanism. Our scent and narrow field of vision is useless for detection of threats so we rely on hearing almost exclusively.

Humans gains a lot for losing directional hearing -- if any of our ancestors had it. Things we could likely consider as benefits to our hearing over a directional-based system -- better avoidance of predators, stero-scopic direction sense, ability to hear underwater (few non-aquatic mammals can), reduced drag (when swimming), easier to keep warm, larger brain size (since your sensory organs need to be fairly close to the front of your brain), easier birthing, better balance (since the inner ear provides stability and the further apart they are the better) likely allowing us to walk upright so easily, allowing vision to be specialize for hunting/gathering, etc.

Answer 2

1. Our ears have underdeveloped muscles and are limited and most of the time non-functional. It is composed of mostly elastic cartilage.

2. We lost it because human ears and indeed all primate ears have evolved under a need to have 360* hearing. Sure, we may not be able to home in on the source of sound waves, but we can detect sounds all around us.

Answer 3

Is there a need for humans to control the direction of their hearing? No?

Then there's your answer.

Answer 4

humans cant because our ears are too small. go to the library and look up some stuff about foxes and animals like like that and compare how their ears move to humans ears. oh wait a second you could just go to a web site, duh. sorry i forgot the internet had that stuff for a second. haha