HEAR, HEAR FOR OUR FUNNY LOOKING HUMAN EARS.

 HEAR, HEAR FOR OUR FUNNY LOOKING HUMAN EARS.

"My, what beautiful ears you have," said no one ever.  It's just as well ears are positioned on the side of our head, not in the middle of our face like our nose.  I mean, noses aren't exactly something to get excited about either, but at least they don't look like a raised spiral maze or labrynth.  There are no beautiful noses.  A good nose is one that draws the least attention to itself.  The worst noses have their owners scurrying to a plastic surgeon as soon as maturity and money allow but not many resort to surgery for their ears.  For the ones who do, it is usually because their ears stick out from the sides of their head like vertical wing flaps or angry elephants.

Speaking of angry elephants, nature has cruelly denied humans the ability to express emotions with their auditory appendages.  When an elephant is upset, you know it.  It spreads its formidably large ears to make itself look bigger (as if that were necessary, given their size).  If that doesn't send you running, they'll charge you.  Horses, also, have ways of letting you know their displeasure - ears back.  Given that they are also large animals, it's wise to know what their ears are telling you as a means of life preservation.

Dogs, after centuries of breeding interference by humans, now come with an assortment of ear shapes from pointy to floppy.  Of course, their ancestor, the wolf has pointy ears, making them look alert and intelligent.  No one knows for sure why breeding and the domestication of dogs caused floppy ears.  Theories abound and some are that animals bred for herding and listening for prey kept their pointy ears, which one can assume means that these ears hear better than floppy ones.  Floppy ears apparently help stir up the ground so that pooch can be a better tracker, able to pick up smells from the ground. That seems to be a stretch of the imagination as theories go and I don't know how this works for the shorter floppy eared breeds like Golden Retrievers except that they look cute with them.  Floppy ears, however, are harder to clean and prone to fungal infections and the like.

But back to humans.

According to an AI article:

"Humans developed ear pinnae—the external, cartilaginous flaps of the ear—primarily as a survival mechanism to amplify sound and locate its source. Inherited from our ancient mammalian ancestors..."

Also:

"While many mammals have large, mobile pinnae that they can swivel to track predators or prey, humans and other primates evolved to rely more on turning our heads."

Then on reading an academic article, or a tiny portion thereof, titled: "Evolution of the Mammalian Ear: An Evolvability Hypothesis" (various authors), I came upon this nto very enlightening sentence:

"The transformation of the primary jaw joint into the mammalian ear ossicles is one of the most iconic transitions in vertebrate evolution, but the drivers of this complex evolutionary trajectory are not fully understood. " 

This gave me the cue that I should go no further in trying to understand the anatomy of the ear and would instead concentrate on its appearance.  Nor was I going to drag you, dear reader, down that rabbit hole as it seems that no one can really explain to anyone's satisfaction why we are adorned with our particular variety of hearing appendage.

Birds avoid all this trouble by having holes for ears.  That is, the outside of their ears are simply holes and their hearing is excellent.  Apparently, who or whatever our evolutionary engineers are, they decided to take highly divergent paths when designing mammals and birds.

If humans merely had holes, not cartilaginous flaps, external to their ear canals, we would never have been able to adorn ourselves with earrings.  Even worse, whatever would our spectacles have been able to rest upon?  Probably they would have required elastic bands like swim goggles or, perhaps, we could have had a hole drilled through the bridge of the nose through which a bar could be passed and then lens positioned either side in front of the eyes.

I doubt, though, that if we were given the task of designing our own ears, we would have come up with two rather odd looking, fleshy knobs that would protrude from the sides of our heads.

Whenever you watch a science fiction movie in which humanoid looking aliens are portrayed, the special effects people will always have fun with the ears.  Either they will be larger, pointy perhaps, or not there at all.  I think that is because our ears are probably the most alien things about us.  At best they look like Ammonites, the shells of Cephalopods.

Ammonite

How would we have felt if we had lovely pointy ears atop our heads like an Alsatian, with a fine covering of short hair on the back?  

I had AI create the picture above, but it wouldn't get rid of the human ears.  I'm still learning.  However, I think the pointy ears on the girl look rather fetching compared to our human ones.  Ours are, nonetheless, a bit more compact and handier for hanging things on and, now that I think of it, it would be a lot harder to hold a smartphone up to those pointy ears.

 Perhaps our mammalian designers were thinking ahead after all.

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