Abstract:

The multi-stage learning model posits that children learn from their parents in infancy and expand their knowledge by learning from peers or from skilled adults, as they reach adulthood. While extant research has focused mostly on direct teaching, children are known to learn through variable types of social interactions, and cultural learning can be seen more as a product of children’s accumulated and lived experiences in their social environment. In particular, hunter-gatherer children learn subsistence skills while joining mothers’ foraging trips from an early age. Thus, children’s social networks during women's subsistence trips may be a nexus for social learning opportunities. To investigate whether women's subsistence networks scaffold cultural learning processes, we present focal-follow data of women’s subsistence trips collected during 230 days in a BaYaka hunter-gatherer community in the Republic of the Congo. Using a stochastic block model for repeat observation data with uneven sampling, we find that, during women's subsistence trips, children co-forage with their peers at high rates, specifically with non-kin peers in middle childhood and adolescence. Our results further suggest that individuals in middle childhood bridge the interactions of those in early childhood and adolescence and, therefore, play a central role in cultural learning.

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