Congolese BaYaka children's learning and exploring in a village context

Childhood is a key period for acquiring and transmitting cultural knowledge and skill. Hunter-gatherer children, such as the Congolese BaYaka, learn autonomously through exploration, play, and participation in foraging and domestic activities. Most previous work has focused on how BaYaka allocate time to learning activities while living in forest camps. By focusing on a village context, we aim to further investigate BaYaka learning ecologies by examining (1) how children sample their social and physical environments, (2) whom they spend time with, and (3) how they allocate their time to play, work-themed play, and work. We do so by analysing video observations of 57 children aged between 7 and 16 years old. BaYaka children spent 75% of their time in the village, where they had extensive opportunities to sample their social surroundings. They spent most of their time alone or in child-only groups, rather than with adults, highlighting the potential for horizontal transmission and individual learning as prominent pathways to knowledge acquisition. Finally, children spent a third of their time in play activities and another third in foraging and domestic tasks, suggesting that play and work are complementary flexible learning mechanisms. These results illustrate how embodied capital is co-constructed by children and their environments, with children actively investing time and effort in activities that are both developmentally rewarding and contextually relevant, thereby shaping the repertoire of skills and knowledge they carry into adulthood.