If you want to have lots of kids, look for a Barry White instead of a Justin Timberlake. Men with a deep voices have more offspring, a new study suggests.
Previous studies conducted by David Feinberg of McMaster University in Canada have shown that women are more attracted to men with deeper voices, judging them to be older, healthier and more masculine than their higher-pitched rivals.
Men, on the other hand, go for women with higher pitched voices because they find them more attractive, subordinate, feminine, healthier and younger-sounding.
In the new study, detailed in a recent issue of the journal Biology Letters, Feinberg set out to see how that attraction to deeper-voiced men affected reproduction and the survival of offspring.
"While we find in this new study that voice pitch is not related to offspring mortality rates," Feinberg said, "we find that men with low voice pitch have higher reproductive success and more children born to them."
To look for any relationship between voice pitch and birth rates, the researchers studied the Hadza tribe of Tanzania, one of the last true hunter-gatherer cultures. Because the Hadza have no modern birth control, the researchers were able to compare birth rates without any outside influencing factors.
They found that Hadza men with deeper voices had more children than those with higher voices.
This relationship could give insight into the evolution of the human voices as well as how we choose our mates.
"If our ancestors went through a similar process," Feinberg said, "this could be one reason why men's and women's voices sound different."
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