Journal reference: Biology Letters (DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2007. Testosterone only has a slight effect on voice development during puberty, it does not effect the pitch or resonance, the size and. This, she says, allows for an alternate explanation for her findings: “Maybe men with lower pitched voices feel more confident to say the children are theirs.” However, Apicella notes that some of the children listed by the Hadza men as being their own, might have in fact been fathered by other members of the group. ![]() For example, while Hadza men have an average voice pitch of 115 Hz, the women average around 210 Hz. Researchers speculate that evolution favoured men with deeper voices, and that this perhaps explains why men’s voices are so much lower than that of women. He adds that there appears to be a connection between testosterone and sperm quality, which might explain why the Hadza men with low-pitched voices fathered the most children.Īnother possible explanation is that women prefer men with deep voices because such men are perceived as holding higher social status, says Puts. “Testosterone is associated with all sorts of things, like high libido and physical competitive ability,” Puts notes. High levels of this hormone cause the vocal cords to lengthen and thicken, and therefore vibrate at a lower frequency. Puts explains that men typically have deep voices as a result of high testosterone levels. “That’s a huge difference” in terms of reproductive success, says David Puts, an anthropologist at Penn State in University Park, Pennsylvania, US, who studies voice preferences. For example, men who had an average voice pitch around 90 Hz had about two more children on average than those with a super-high voice around 160 Hz. After controlling for possible confounding factors, such as age, researchers discovered that men with the lowest voices had the most children. On average, the men had 4.8 children and a voice pitch of around 115 Hz. She also recorded their age and the number of children they had fathered. The Hadza, who live in Tanzania, have no modern birth control and practice serial monogamy.Īpicella recorded 49 Hadza men saying the Swahili word hujambo, which loosely translates as “hello” in English, and calculated their voice pitch using computer analysis (hear a recording of one of the men). ![]() The Hadza women generally dig for root plants and gather fruits, while men primarily hunt animals and collect honey. Coren Apicella at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, and her colleagues found a way around this challenge by studying the Hadza, one of the last remaining hunter-gatherer cultures in the world.
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