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Washington - Men with deep voices have more children, probably because they have a wider choice of mates, according to a study released on Tuesday.

“We found that men with deep voices have more children than their high-pitched counterparts,” said Coren Apicella, a graduate anthropology student at Harvard University, who spent six months in northern Tanzania last year, studying the nomadic, hunter-gatherer Hadza people.

The study, a collaborative effort between Harvard University in Massachusetts, McMaster University in Canada and Florida State University, was the first to try to determine if there is a link between voice pitch in men and “Darwinian fitness” in humans.

“Darwinian fitness, in lay terms, means the number of children we have,” said Apicella, who told reporters that the research did not find a link between voice pitch and the children’s health or mortality rate.

The mortality rate of children fathered by men with high-pitched voices was not significantly greater than that of children fathered by deep-voiced men, she said.

“Based on these findings, we speculate that the associations reported between reproductive success and voice pitch in men are probably mediated by greater access to fecund women,” the study says.

“It doesn’t seem like deep-voiced men are passing on good genes to their offspring, as has been hypothesised in the past, but probably has to do with them having greater access to women,” said Apicella.

Apicella visited nine Hadza encampments and had 49 men and 52 women from the nomadic tribe “sit in my Landrover and say ‘Hujambo’, which means ‘hello’, into a microphone,” she told reporters.

The recordings were then analysed for sound frequency.

Study participants were also asked to report how many children they have, and how many were still alive.

“The man with the lowest-pitch voice in the study fathered 10 children, of whom nine are still living, and the man with the highest-pitch voice fathered three children, of whom one is still living,” Apicella told reporters.

Voice pitch was not found to be a good predictor of a women’s Darwinian fitness.

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