Sex differences in daily activity intensity and energy expenditure and their relationship to cortisol among <scp>BaYaka</scp> foragers from the Congo Basin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: The pooling of energetic resources and food sharing have been widely documented among hunter-gatherer societies. Much less is known about how the energetic costs of daily activities are distributed across individuals in such groups, including between women and men. Moreover, the metabolic physiological correlates of those activities and costs are relatively understudied. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Here, we tracked physical activity, energy expenditure (EE), and cortisol production among Congo Basin BaYaka foragers engaged in a variety of daily subsistence activities (n = 37). Given its role in energy mobilization, we measured overall daily cortisol production and short-term cortisol reactivity through saliva sampling; we measured physical activity levels and total EE via the wGT3X-bt actigraph and heart rate monitor. RESULTS: We found that there were no sex differences in likelihood of working in common activity locations (forest, garden, house). Across the day, women spent greater percentage time in moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (%MVPA) and had lower total EE than men. Females with higher EE (kCal/hr) produced greater cortisol throughout the day. Though not statistically significant, we also found that individuals with greater %MVPA had larger decreases in cortisol reactivity. DISCUSSION: BaYaka women sustained higher levels of physical activity but incurred lower energetic costs than men, even after factoring in sex differences in body composition. Our findings suggest that the distribution of physical activity demands and costs are relevant to discussions regarding how labor is divided and community energy budgets take shape in such settings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".