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Study links voice pitch in men
with number of children
26 September, 2007
Men with the deepest voices have the
most number of children – at least,
it’s so in hunter-gatherer populations
in Africa.
A group of researchers from the United
States spent six months studying a
nomadic tribe in Africa and found that
the men with the deepest voices have
the most children.
The researchers say that is because
men with a deep voice have a wider
choice of mates.
This is the first study to examine the
correlation between voice pitch and
child-bearing success, and the results
point to the role of voice pitch in
Darwinian fitness in humans.
The study has been published online in
the latest issue of the journal
Biology Letters.
Barry White, the singer, seemed to be
a good case to prove the theory that
deep-voiced men tend to have more
children – he fathered eight children
– but the researchers went to Africa
to complete their study.
The study was led by Coren Apicella, a
doctoral candidate in the Department
of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts
and Sciences at Harvard University,
with David Feinberg of McMaster
University and Frank Marlowe of
Florida State University.
Coren Apicella, who has been in
Tanzania studying the Hadza
hunter-gatherer population there,
says: “They’re really neat to study
because they’re one of the last
hunter-gatherer populations left on
the planet.”
She adds: “This means that they're
mobile, they sleep under the stars,
the men hunt for food using bow and
arrow, and women gather food such as
berries and they dig for tubers and so
forth. This is likely to be how our
ancestors lived for much of our
evolutionary history, so 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.”
Coren Apicella spent six months in
Tanzania interviewing Hadza men and
recording their voices. She had them
say ‘hujambo,’ which loosely
translates in English to ‘hello’ and
from that she analyzed their voice
pitch and she had conversations with
them as well. She also collected their
reproductive histories from them.
While the research found that men with
low voices too have more children,
there is no scientific evidence that
it is the voice that makes them more
attractive. According to Coren
Apicella, so far, the only evidence is
anecdotal.
She also says it is hard to determine
whether the deeper-voiced men were
more attractive than the
higher-pitched me.
“It is hard, she says, “because you
have to control for age too. I do know
a couple of men out there that I
personally found attractive – of
course they had low voices.”
Men are attractive in a number of
ways, so it may be too early for
deep-voiced men to get excited by the
findings.
More work needed to find out if
baritones just have higher
testosterone levels, giving them
greater prowess, remarks Apicella.
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