Men with deep voices produce significantly more children than those who speak at a higher pitch, according to a new study from researchers with Harvard University, McMaster University and Florida State University.
Researchers, who based their findings on a group of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania known as the Hadza, found that men with the masculine voices father more children.
The team of researchers chose nomadic tribe in Africa that lives much the same way that human beings did 200,000 years ago for the study because they use no birth control, according to the lead researcher Coren Apicella, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.
"They're really neat to study because they're one of the last hunter-gatherer populations left on the planet," adding that the “Hadza [people] are really ideal because they provide us with an excellent window to our past. They also don't use any birth control methods, so they're what we call a natural fertility population."
After studying the reproductive patterns of the modern-day hunter-gatherers for six months, Apicella and her co-researchers David Feinberg of McMaster University and Frank Marlowe of Florida State University found that males with lower vocal pitch had more surviving children.
To reach their findings that published online this week in the journal Biology Letters the researchers first recorded voice 49 men and 52 women between the ages of 18 and 55, in nine different Hadza camps saying “hujambo”, a Swahili word for ‘hello’ into a microphone. After collecting the voice recording they calculated their voice pitch using computer analysis.
The researchers found that males who hit lower notes as they talked had more surviving children. Men with an average voice pitch around 90 Hz had about two more children on average than those with a super-high voice around 160 Hz.
“The results of this study have implications for the evolution of vocal dimorphism,” says Apicella. “While we don’t know the exact reason that these men with deeper voices have fathered more children, it may be that they have increased access to mates, begin reproducing at an earlier age or their wives have shorter inter-birth intervals because they provide more food to them.”
It is widely known that women are more attracted to men with masculine voices. They consider deep voices more attractive, dominant, masculine, sexy, assertive, confident and friendly.
According to an earlier research conducted by psychologists at the University of St Andrews in 2006, women prefer men with masculine voices, especially during their most fertile phase. The study suggested that fertile women prefer men with dominant voices because they signal strong genes thought to indicate long-term health and higher reproductive success.
Men’s voices are significantly deeper than women’s due to the action of testosterone. High levels of this hormone cause the vocal cords to lengthen and thicken, resulting vibration at a lower frequency.
As the men are attractive in a number of ways, so it can not be determined at this stage that the deeper-voiced men were more attractive than the higher-pitched men, said Apicella.
According to her, there are several reasons that relate lower pitch with the reproductive success. The high-pitched voices are suggestive of higher testosterone levels, which could lead females to apprehend such men as better hunters and therefore better providers, she said.
"Or it could be that men with deeper voices simply start reproducing earlier. We really don't know what is behind this yet," Apicella said.
She said more work is needed to find out the relationship between voice pitch and the reproductive potential of a man.
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