Why is human hearing so poor compared to our fur friends? If its the modern comfortable living, then why have the fur babies retained such gret hearing?
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Generally selection pressure gets hearing good enough. Dogs and cats have both been hunting animals much more recently than us, also hunting in different ways – we’ve been hunting large game that your going to be able to see a decent way off and makes more noise for a long time.
Short answer: evolution decided what was was most valuable . Semi serious answer, Humans opted into visual processing mains with a secondary speech class. Also our hunting style (attrition) doesn’t really require fantastic hearing.
There are a number of reasons why human hearing is so poor. One reason is that the ear is not very efficient at collecting sound waves. Another reason is that the ear is not very good at filtering out background noise. Finally, the ear has a limited frequency range that it can detect.
Thinking in evolutionary terms, what are the advantages of better hearing?
If you are a pray, you can more easily spot a predator.
If you are a predator, you can more easily track a pray.
Now while useful, for human, not really. We chased the pray in pack, and mostly tracked visually and as of 20-10 000 years ago we transitioned mostly to farming, and the role of keen hearing became even less important for procreation.
Now are there disadvantages for too sharp hearing?
Think about it, what do sudden, noises do to your concentration? For me getting distracted is greatly detrimental to various activities. Most of all learning.
I often see my dog, going from sleep to fully alert and growling in millisecond, because of (I am assuming) a noise I can barely, if at all hear.
It is possible the “poor” hearing is actually a benefit to a person whose productivity and resting depends on not being distracted? To a point, I wouldn’t be surprised if yes.
Adding to what others have said, it has to be mentioned that humans are more like generalists in the animal kingdom. They aren’ the best at – seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, running, swimming, diving, climbing, grabbing etc – but there’s no other animal that can do *all* these things in a sufficient manner like humans can.
Human hearing is not really that poor anyway.
In terms of range, we can hear about 10 octaves, and (approximately) so can dogs. Dogs’ hearing range seems impressive because it goes higher, but ours goes lower. In a linear scale, that looks like a bad trade, but in terms of octaves (which, for sound, is a fairer comparison) the range is shifted over by a couple of octaves but about equally large.
Compared to various other animals, our hearing range is [not especially bad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range) (also not especially good).
Being able to detect a sound isn’t the whole story, and it is thought that many non-primate mammals have a less-developed pitch perception compared to primates. Humans do alright on that front.
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