Women's subsistence networks scaffold cultural transmission among BaYaka foragers in the Congo Basin.

ABSTRACT: In hunter-gatherer societies, women's subsistence activities are crucial for food provisioning and children's social learning but are understudied relative to men's activities. To understand the structure of women's foraging networks, we present 230 days of focal-follow data in a BaYaka community. To analyze these data, we develop a stochastic blockmodel for repeat observations with uneven sampling. We find that women's subsistence networks are characterized by cooperation between kin, gender homophily, and mixed age-group composition. During early childhood, individuals preferentially coforage with adult kin, but those in middle childhood and adolescence are likely to coforage with nonkin peers, providing opportunities for horizontal learning. By quantifying the probability of coforaging

SUBMITTER: Jang H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10780863 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature