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

In hunter-gatherer societies, women’s subsistence activities are crucial
for food provisioning and children’s social learning, but they are
understudied relative to men’s activities. To better understand the
structure of women’s foraging networks, we present data of 230 days
focal-follows in a BaYaka community. To analyze these data, we develop a
stochastic block model 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 co-forage with adult kin, but
those in middle-childhood and adolescence are likely to co-forage with
non-kin peers, providing opportunities for horizontal learning. By
quantifying the probability of co-foraging ties across age-classes and
relatedness levels, our findings provide insights into the scope for
social learning during women’s subsistence activities in a real-world
foraging population and provide ground-truth values for key parameters
used in formal models of cumulative cultural change.