ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2022
Girls in early childhood increase food returns of nursing women during subsistence activities of the BaYaka in the Republic of Congo.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Article
- Energetic Value of Women's Work: Assessing Maternal Energetic Costs From Acorn Foraging.American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Article
- Religious Involvement Is Associated With Higher Fertility and Lower Maternal Investment, but More Alloparental Support Among Gambian Mothers.American journal of human biology : the official journal of the Human Biology Council · 2024Article
- BaYaka mothers balance childcare and subsistence tasks during collaborative foraging in Congo Basin.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Women's subsistence networks scaffold cultural transmission among BaYaka foragers in the Congo Basin.Science advances · 2024Article
- Hunter-Gatherer children's close-proximity networks: Similarities and differences with cooperative and communal breeding systems.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Cooperation and partner choice among Agta hunter-gatherer children: An evolutionary developmental perspective.PloS one · 2023Article
- Music production and its role in coalition signaling during foraging contexts in a hunter-gatherer society.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Girls in early childhood increase food returns of nursing women during subsistence activities of the BaYaka in the Republic of Congo.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
Nursing mothers face an energetic trade-off between infant care and work. Under pooled energy budgets, this trade-off can be reduced by assistance in food acquisition and infant care tasks from non-maternal carers. Across cultures, children also often provide infant care. Yet the question of who helps nursing mothers during foraging has been understudied, especially the role of children. Using focal follow data from 140 subsistence expeditions by BaYaka women in the Republic of Congo, we investigated how potential support from carers increased mothers' foraging productivity. We found that the number of girls in early childhood (ages 4-7 years) in subsistence groups increased food returns of nursing women with infants (kcal collected per minute). This effect was stronger than that of other adult women, and older girls in middle childhood (ages 8-13 years) and adolescence (ages 14-19 years). Child helpers were not necessarily genetically related to nursing women. Our results suggest that it is young girls who provide infant care while nursing mothers are acquiring food-by holding, monitoring and playing with infants-and, thus, that they also contribute to the energy pool of the community during women's subsistence activities. Our study highlights the critical role of children as carers from early childhood.
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