Why babies cry so loud, as the noise can potentially attract predators in the wild?
In: Biology
That is an incredibly low risk event, since babies are kept on the mother at almost all times in tribal or hunter/gatherer societies. There was no special crib in a dark room with a sound machine; they were just strapped to the back (or front) and carried around for the first few years. So any cry would quickly result in a tit in the mouth or a change (they generally just cry if hungry or wet).
Predators stalking humans did much better with kids that were toddlers and older who could run out into the bush and suddenly find themselves alone. There weren’t many predators that would try to infiltrate a human camp. Lone human? Sure. Tribe? No.
And the evolutionary advantage of being fed and otherwise attended to far, far outweighed the risk of being eaten.
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.
Primarily humans where settled in dwellings, with babies being communally cared for, so while it may have attracted predators, we had a degree of fortification, fire or just sheer numbers to ward them off in the home area. If you look at monkeys, their babies are almost completely passive, being almost more akin to a kangaroo than the screaming parasite they evolved into with the homo- genus.
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