Abstract

Understanding the dynamics of inter-group cooperation in human adaptation has been the subject of recent empirical and theoretical studies in evolutionary anthropology, beginning to fill gaps in our knowledge of how interactions across political, economic and social domains can – and often do – lead to stable, large-scale cooperation. Here we investigate dyadic intergroup cooperation in shotgun hunting in the Republic of the Congo. In the Congo Basin, inter-group cooperation between foragers and farmers is at the centre of an exchange system maintained by traditional norms and institutions such as fictive kinship. Here, we focused on what factors predict cooperative shotgun hunting exchanges between BaYaka and Yambe. We conducted structured interviews with 48 BaYaka hunters and 18 Yambe men who organise hunts in a village along the Motaba River. We used Bayesian multilevel regression models to investigate the influence of Yambe and BaYaka attributes on probability of dyadic cooperation. We found that BaYaka men's reputations as skilled hunters and their family size each predicted cooperation in shotgun hunting, whereas there was no effect of Yambe attributes (status, wealth, family size). We discuss the results in terms of evolutionary models of men as hunters and inter-group cooperation, as well as biodiversity conservation implications.