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.