lalla-ilaria/Children_eco_knowledge

# Children_eco_knowledge This repository contains data and code to reproduce results from Pretelli, I., Borgerhoff Mulder, M., & McElreath, R. (2022). _Rates of ecological knowledge learning in Pemba, Tanzania: Implications for childhood evolution._ Evolutionary Human Sciences, 4, E34 ## Abstract Humans live in diverse, complex niches where survival and reproduction are conditional on the acquisition of locally relevant knowledge. Humans also have long childhoods, spending more than a decade before they begin to produce more than they consume. Whether the time it takes to learn locally relevant knowledge has been a selective force in the evolution of long human childhood is unclear, because there is little comparative data on the growth of ecological knowledge throughout childhood. We measured ecological knowledge at different ages in the Island of Pemba, Zanzibar (TZ), interviewing 93 children and teenagers between 4 and 26 years old. We then developed a series of Bayesian latent-knowledge models to estimate individual knowledge acquisition in one or different dimensions, and to infer the influence of age, as well as of activities and social environment on such knowledge. In the studied population, children keep learning during the whole pre-reproductive period, but at varying rate, the increase with age being fastest in young children and slower in teenager and young adults. Sex differences in knowledge appear during middle childhood, driven by increases in boy-specific knowledge, as it appears when parsing knowledge in multiple dimensions. Individual activity patterns contribute to knowledge acquisition and mediate the emergence of differences between the sexes. Co-residence with mothers and, for boys only, with fathers is associated with greater knowledge, whereas we detected almost no effect of school attendance. ## The repo contains: - makefile.R: r script that defines set of tasks to be executed. Runs in order all the necessary scripts to produce the resul …