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Quote by: treme  Well there's certainly a logical evolutionary reason for it we just don't know exactly what it is.
The voice box gets bigger during puberty in both sexes. Males just experience quite a bit more of it.
Could it be that male voices haven't evolved to be deeper but female voices have evolved to be more child like? This could be because males are more likely to run and help when a child is in danger. It's interesting that "Women and children" are grouped together in life threatening situations (Women and children first!).
But if you think about it another way, predators tend to pick off the weakest of the group. The easiest to pick off are children and lame adults (It's also interesting that our voices get higher in pitch when we're in pain). How could it be advantageous for an adult (non-weak) member of a group to sound like easy prey? Call attention away from the children perhaps? Make the predator waste energy chasing a fleet footed woman so that the children remain safe?
Lots of other possibilities... |
For one thing I would suspect that primitive women were just as strong as primitive men were. They can naturally endure more pain and would be better at survival then men.
Sometimes animals will use noise to warn or to scare off potential preditors. If you bang on things a lion might run off. But I doubt if human voices were evolved for that purpose. I just cannot image that sceaming would give anyone much of an advantage in warding off animals who often attack swiftly from the bushes. The apes and chimps are always making racket but I think it has more to do with some kind of socializing then anything else. Perhaps for singing when we wanted to get creative but singing in harmony with low and high scales is hardly something of interest to evolutionists.
But we can start off with now and work backwards. What advantages does this give us nowadays? Does it make men better hunters or fishermen to get a larger voice box? Does it make us better fighters, or does it help us to escape dangers? Does it improve our social behavior as pack animals?
Saying it has an evolutionary purpose even if we do not know what it is... to me is not a worthwhile answer. It is a non-answer.