Deep Male Voices Evolved To Intimidate Men, Not Attract Women, Pennsylvania State University Study

An international team of researchers has found that deep voices in primates, including humans, might have evolved more as a means to intimidate rivals than to attract females for mating. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team describes three separate experiments they carried out to test their ideas on the reasons for large differences in the vocal frequency range of male primates.

The goal of the researchers with this new effort was to try to better understand why vocalizations of male and females primates differ so dramatically and what impact there was, if any, on low vocalizations of some members of the different groups, which they noted, can exaggerate body size.