This study explores the research question: What socio-ecological factors are conducive to women’s hunting? Using life history theory and behavioral ecology as a base, the authors pose four hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that women will hunt when there are fewer conflicts with childcare. The second hypothesis is that women will hunt when there are fewer cultural restrictions regarding the use of hunting technology. The third hypothesis is that women will hunt when there are low-risk game within range of camp, dogs are used in hunting, or hunting is in groups. Lastly, the fourth hypothesis suggests that women will hunt when they play essential roles on informational tasks. There is enough evidence to support the third and fourth hypotheses. The study also shows that there is considerable evidence that women hunt cross-culturally.

A previous study conducted by Singh (2017) investigates why and how features of shamanism have culturally evolved, one such feature being shamanistic trance. However, the authors of this article argue that Singh fails to distinguish between different types of shamanistic trance. They find that possession trance, as compared to trance without possession, is primarily dominated by females and found in complex societies.

Authors test three explanations as to why bloodletting is such a near-universal therapeutic cultural practice in "the west." Using references from HRAF's database which are then re-coded for colocalization, practitioner, and cultural explanation, they find that bloodletting is practiced therapeutically by many unrelated cultures worldwide; it is heterogeneous in both form and cultural significance across the globe while still fairly ubiquitous in general. Authors posit that the widespread propensity toward bloodletting in human populations is explained by the universality of affecting/affected cognitive mechanisms. After analyzing cultural data in eHRAF, authors incorporated experiments and modeling that further supported this conclusion.

Lullabies are often touted as universal to all human cultures, regardless of time and place. In order to test this axiom, this article examines all 186 societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, and codes them for the presence or absence of lullabies. The result ultimately hinges on the meaning of the word “lullaby”: when lullabies were defined as a strict and culturally conserved repertoire of songs sung to soothe infants, they were found to be neither a statistical nor even a “near” universal. However, when lullabies were defined as any type of singing used to soothe children, they were a near universal, with 96.8% of societies in the sample coded as having lullabies.

In this study, the authors explore the presence of disagreement between parents and their children over choice in spouse as an extension of theories regarding the evolution of mate choice. In non-human animal studies, free mate choice is generally associated with higher fitness. Thus mate preferences, in humans and non-human animals, may have evolved to improve fitness in comparison to random mating. Arranged marriages might likewise reduce biological fitness if parents choose a different spouse than their children would choose. Using ethnographic data from 119 societies, the authors assess the degree to which parents and offspring disagree on mate choice. In about 85% of the cases examined, parents disagreed with offspring choice. The authors call for explicit research on fitness outcomes when disagreement occurs.

This study uses Bayesian phylogenetic regression modelling across 131 largely non-industrial societies to test how variation of punishment is impacted by social, economic, and political organization. The authors focus on the presence of norm violations and types of punishments, and explores their relationships. The norm violations include adultery, rape, religious violations, food violations, and war cowardice. While the types of punishment are reputational, material, physical, or education. This study suggests a hypothesis for each type of punishment in relation to socioecological variables.

This study challenges the Big Gods hypothesis, which suggests that moral gods are a critical factor that preceded the evolution of complex societies. Using the Seshat database, the authors expanded the codebook and database of their retracted article (see notes). The results show significant support that sociopolitical complexity and moralizing gods are associated and that sociopolitical complexity appears to precede the presence of Big Gods. The authors also show some support that sociopolitical complexity might be a driving factor of moralizing gods. Still, they state that the results are incomplete since they only focus on the possibility of reciprocal causality.

The authors examine a world-wide sample of cultures to assess whether the romantic-sexual kiss is a human universal. They also test for an association between romantic-sexual kissing and social complexity.

Social scientists are equivocal as to the importance of teaching (as contrasted with other forms of learning) in traditional societies. While many cultural anthropologists have downplayed the importance of teaching, cognitive psychologists often argue that teaching is a salient human universal. Here the authors investigate cultural transmission among 23 hunter-gatherer populations to explore the relative importance of teaching among foragers.

This article focuses on the culture of honor hypothesis, which suggests the distinctive selective pressures of horticultural and pastoral subsistences on culture. The authors explore which cultural evolution model best explains the variations suggested by the culture of honor hypothesis: the memetic, evolutionary psychological, dual inheritance, or niche construction model. The authors use the eHRAF database to test these rival models and explore how human psychology has adapted to pastoral and horticultural environments. The results support that it is more common for pastoral societies to show a reactive psychological phenotype. After considering their analysis and the distinct cases, the authors conclude that the niche construction is the best model to explain their results. They also emphasize the importance of continuing empirical analyses to test these models.