Why not eat certain animals? Evolved cognitive intuitions shape food taboos in Congo Basin hunter-gatherers

Food taboos and avoidances are widespread across human societies and present a longstanding evolutionary puzzle: why do people refrain from consuming nutritionally valuable foods? Drawing on quantitative data from over 200 BaYaka hunter-gatherers concerning 57 animal species in the Congo Basin, I document the prevalence and explanations of animal food taboos in relation to age, sex, and reproductive status. The findings indicate that food avoidances clustered strongly around illness-related concerns, particularly those involving young infants, and that explanations frequently invoked causal pathways in which salient morphological or behavioural characteristics of animals were believed to be assimilated into infants' bodies, consistent with principles of sympathetic magic. Women avoided more animal foods than men, especially during reproductive ages, with this difference diminishing at older ages. Pregnant and breastfeeding women avoided significantly more animal foods than non-pregnant and non-breastfeeding women of reproductive age, suggesting that observed sex differences were largely driven by reproductive status. Foods avoided by pregnant and breastfeeding women did not selectively target species with higher parasite loads, providing no support for pathogen-avoidance explanations. Likewise, the most tabooed animals were not more threatened than the least tabooed species, offering no support for functional explanations based on species conservation. Taken together, and in light of comparative ethnographic evidence, these findings suggest that BaYaka food taboos are best understood as products of intuitive causal reasoning shaped by vulnerability, misfortune, and cognitive salience, rather than as adaptive responses to pathogens or conservation concerns, or as expressions of social dominance.