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Jang H, Ross CT, Boyette AH, Janmaat KR, Kandza V, Redhead D. Women's subsistence networks scaffold cultural transmission among BaYaka foragers in the Congo Basin. SCIENCE ADVANCES 2024; 10:eadj2543. [PMID: 38198536 PMCID: PMC10780863 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj2543] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/15/2023] [Accepted: 12/11/2023] [Indexed: 01/12/2024]
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 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 culture.
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Affiliation(s)
- Haneul Jang
- Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
- Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, Toulouse School of Economics, 1 Esplanade de l'Université, 31080 Toulouse cedex 06, France
| | - Cody T. Ross
- Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
| | - Adam H. Boyette
- Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
| | - Karline R.L. Janmaat
- Department of Evolutionary and Population Biology, Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam, Science Park 904, 1098 XH Amsterdam, Netherlands
- Department of Cognitive Psychology, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Leiden University, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333 AK, Leiden, Netherlands
| | - Vidrige Kandza
- Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
| | - Daniel Redhead
- Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103 Leipzig, Germany
- Department of Sociology, University of Groningen, Grote Rozenstraat 31, 9712 TG Groningen, Netherlands
- Inter-University Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands
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