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Article History

Received: 10 October 2024

Accepted: 1 September 2025

First Online: 10 September 2025

Competing interests

: The author declares no competing interests.

: This project has ethics approval from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (No. 2023_16, dated 23/11/2023) and the author holds a research permit issued by the Vanuatu Kaljoral Senta (No. 20240318025454210, dated 20/02/2024). The research was performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki in that individuals’ data have been kept anonymised and secure under restricted (non-public) access, and the research was conducted with institutional approval from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Vanuatu Cultural Centre.

: The national census data used here were collected by Vanuatu’s National Bureau of Statistics, which is the legal body obligated to collect such data from individuals within Vanuatu. While the National Bureau of Statistics did not collect records of consent from participants at the point of data collection, they did assure participants that “All information collected will be treated as highly confidential.” Moreover, the national census is a well-known institution in Vanuatu, and participants would be aware that their data would only be made public in aggregate (e.g., VNSO, ; Hakkert and Pontifex, ). In accordance with this, the article provides only aggregate statistics, makes no attempts to identify individuals, and does not make individuals’ data publicly available in any way.