  Specialization is a hallmark of humans. Specialization in the real world
(with imperfectly sorted partners, imperfectly calibrated supply and demand,
and high failure risk) requires redundancy in relationships, which prevents
specialists from going hungry when some of their partners fail to capture
highly variable food items and derive the most value when dividing surplus
harvests. The burgeoning field of multilayer network analysis offers tools to
test for the effect of redundant relationships in food sharing networks on
hunger. We derive measures that include progressively more network structure:
measures without any network structure, those that only include information
about individuals, and those that include all information about individuals and
domains. We test for the effects of these measures in a sample of
horticulturalists living in the savannahs of the Guyana Shield, a nutritionally
precarious environment. Having redundant relationships is associated with a
lower incidence of reported skipped meals. This provides evidence that
redundancy in food sharing networks may mitigate risk associated with the
foraging strategies necessary to support a large-brained, generalist omnivore.
This result has consequences for broader debates in the field of human
evolution such as why humans live in groups with low relatedness.
