Deep-voiced men likely to have more children: study

By Claire Sibonney

TORONTO (Reuters Life!) - 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 on Tuesday.

"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. All it really does is 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.