New York, Sep 27 (IANS) Researchers from the US and Canada have found that women prefer men with deep voices to those with a good physique or an attractive face.
The researchers discovered this after interviewing 52 women and 49 men from the Hadza tribe in Tanzania. Hadza has a population of 800 and their lifestyle reflects those of humans thousands of years ago.
They do not practice birth control and live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with the women gathering berries and searching for wild plants while the men collect honey and hunt animals.
The researchers interviewed them and recorded the voices of the Hadza men and women aged 18 to 55, reported health portal News Medical.
They found that deep voiced men had fathered more children than the non-deep voiced men and the man with the deepest voice had ten surviving children, while the one with the highest pitched voice had only three.
The men with the lower pitched voices possibly had higher testosterone levels, which made them more attractive to women, one of the researchers Coren Apicella said.
Testosterone is a hormone primarily secreted in the testes of males and the ovaries of females. It masculinises the voice at puberty. It is also known as the male hormone that plays a key role in health and well-being.
Apicella says it is also a possibility that men with higher testosterone levels start reproducing earlier in life and could also be better hunters. A better hunter would bring more food home, allowing their wives to have shorter intervals between births.
The scientists suggest a deep voice in a man is comparable to a peacock’s tail – it has no survival value, but attracts the female of the species.