Why babies cry so loud, as the noise can potentially attract predators in the wild?
In: Biology
From an evolutionary perspective, a baby that doesn’t cry at all is unlikely to get fed as frequently as one that cries whenever it’s hungry. So the crying baby will grow up stronger and more able to pass on its genes.
The other half of your premise doesn’t really make much difference. Before the advent of civilisation, humans didn’t really rely on being hidden from predators in order to survive. Just like if you look at antelopes, or zebras, or chimpanzees today: their predators know exactly where they are, they have other tactics to avoid being eaten. Most predators rely on smell to locate their prey and then on sight to hone in on a specific individual when hunting; hearing is a very secondary sense for them.
So a crying baby “giving away the location” of a group of humans wouldn’t really put them at significantly more risk. Whatever techniques they used to avoid being eaten (living in caves, starting fires, shouting and waving pointy sticks) those would need to be done anyway.
The only real danger to human beings that we can avoid by hiding and being silent is a group of other humans.
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