Deep-voiced men have more kids, study finds

[Heard It On The X]

Deep-voiced men have more kids, study finds
Times Colonist (Victoria)
Wed 26 Sep 2007
Page: A2
Section: News
Byline: Claire Sibonney
Dateline: TORONTO
Source: Reuters

TORONTO -- Forget the handsome face, broad shoulders or flirty grin, a deep voice is what attracts women and makes men likely to have more children, researchers said yesterday.

"We think it's sort of like a peacock's tail," said David Feinberg, an assistant professor at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.

"A peacock's tail doesn't help a peacock survive in the world at all ... it's there to attract women. So in this case it's testosterone which masculinizes the voice at puberty," he said in an interview.

The study, published in the journal Biology Letters, showed that men with deep voices had greater reproductive success with women than their higher-pitched counterparts.

Coren Apicella, of Harvard University, interviewed 49 men and 52 women ranging in age from 18 to 55 from the Hadza tribe of Tanzania. It is one of the last hunter-gatherer tribes in the world and does not have access to birth control.

She recorded the pitch frequency of the men and women while they spoke about their reproductive history in their native Swahili.

When Apicella, Feinberg and Frank Marlowe of Florida State University analyzed the recordings they found that the deep-voiced men fathered more children.

The man in the study with the deepest voice had 10 children, nine of which were still alive, while the man with the highest voice had one surviving child from three.

"Maybe these men who have lower voice pitch are more attracted to women, they have higher testosterone levels and they're able to have greater access to mate," said Apicella.

She also suggests men with higher testosterone may be better hunters or that they reproduce earlier than other men.

The findings of the women were inconclusive, which may be because they are more limited reproductively, according to Apicella.