Could elves revolve their ears to listen to sounds?
Many animals have ears that revolve and pivot when they hear noise. Humans have vestigial structures in their ears that allow them to wiggle their ears somewhat. How would elves achieve this same effect.
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Go backwards just a few small steps in our evolutionary tree, and you will encounter the primate sub-order strepsirrhini, consisting of lemurs, galagos, and lorises. These are perhaps not our fiercest cousins, but arguably the cutest.
Relevant here is that these creatures all have the feline-like pinnae that allow for rotation to focus on the direction of a sound. If human and elvish evolution diverged at or near this point in the tree of life, it would be entirely plausible for the elf branch to retain this trait. Elves in fiction are often portrayed as having a pointed pinna; here we are taking it a bit more extreme.
In this sense, where a human might be a large, intelligent, bipedal ape, an elf is likewise a large, intelligent, bipedal lemur.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/a/90220. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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