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.

We collected data in collaboration with the BaYaka people of the Republic of the Congo. We conducted daily focal-follows of BaYaka women’s subsistence groups over a nearly year-long period in 2015 and 2016. Across 230 days of sampling, we collected data from 60 individuals (32 females) in one BaYaka camp. During the study period, however, camp composition fluctuated as some individuals joined and left the community. To account for variation in “risk of co-foraging” introduced by such changes in camp composition, we recorded daily camp composition across the 230-day period and defined the model to account for the probability of co-foraging conditional on coresidence in-camp on the same day. 

We constructed subsistence networks that included the entire-community using focal-follow data from five BaYaka women. We followed each focal woman’s expeditions from the moment the focal woman left the camp until her return, and we continuously recorded the foraging group composition and behaviors of the focal women. Each focal woman was followed, on average, for 46 days (SD = 5.24, range = [40, 53]). These focal women represent 31.25% of the total number of women residing within the camp (N = 16). We coded a network tie between two individuals on a given day as being present if those two individuals were observed together at any point during a daily focal-follow of subsistence activities outside of the camp. That is, if individual i and individual j were both present during a focal-follow on day 1 of the focal-follow of individual f, we coded undirected ties to be present between i-j, j-f, and i-f during that day. Within the subsistence activity networks across 230 days, the average number of days that each dyad appeared together varied greatly, with an average number of 18.79 days (SD = 19.15, range= 0 − 59). Data on genetic relatedness, gender, and age-class were collected during household surveys that were conducted at the beginning of the study period. We used these data to construct a relatedness matrix that contains the coefficient of relatedness, r, for each pair of individuals in our sample. In total, 13.22% of dyads were close kin (0.25 ≤ r ≤ 0.5), 30.62% were distant kin (0 < r < 0.25), and 56.2% were non-kin (r = 0). See Supplementary Materials for further description of the data.