BaYaka mothers balance childcare and subsistence tasks during collaborative foraging in Congo Basin

Abstract

Across cultures, mothers face trade-offs between childcare and other labor. In hunter-gatherer societies, mothers face this choice on a daily basis when deciding either to take infants on foraging trips or to leave them with caregivers in village. Yet, it remains unclear how the presence of infants in foraging groups constrains mothers′ mobility during foraging. Here, we present GPS, energy expenditure and food returns data of 359 foraging trips of 23 BaYaka mothers in the Republic of the Congo. We find that mothers spent more time on out-of-village foraging activities when they took infants along, compared to when they left infants behind. However, infant presence in foraging groups does not affect mothers′ travel distance, travel range, energy expenditure or food returns. Regardless of infant presence, women travel longer and further in a larger area when foraging in groups, compared to when foraging alone, especially in groups with more adults, females and both kin and non-kin. Our results suggest that BaYaka mothers develop ways to accommodate childcare with foraging activities by combining individual-level and group-level behavioural strategies. Our study highlights that group foraging may allow mothers with infants to maintain high mobility, which may have been a key to human range expansion.