The research examines daily food sharing norms of 73 preindustrial societies from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. Multilevel regression models reveal that hunting and less predictable environments are not indicative of everyday food sharing, but offer support for many other predictions. Animal husbandry, external trade, daily labor sharing, and the presence of food storage are all predictive of daily food sharing practices whereas sharing is less common amongst large and stratified societies. These results align with evolutionary theories for food sharing practices.

This book is concerned with explaining variation in the status of women. The author, after measuring over 50 aspects of status, first concludes that status is not a unitary concept. Therefore the author looks at 10 different domains of status. Many traditional explanations are not supported; most support is found for the influence of social complexity which generally lowers female status.

The present research investigates food sharing and labor sharing practices of 98 nonindustrial societies. The aims are to: 1) document the frequency and scope of sharing, and 2) test the theory that greater sharing is adaptive in societies subject to more resource stress (including natural hazards).

Prior research by Oswalt (1973, 1976) and Torrence (1983, 2001) has suggested that risk of resource failure is a significant predictor of toolkit complexity and diversity among hunter-gatherers. In this paper, the same relationship is tested among small-scale herding and farming groups. However, no significant correlation is discovered between any measure of resource risk and any measure of toolkit complexity. The researchers suggest that this absence may be the result of greater reliance on non-technological diversification methods among farmers (i.e. spatial diversification, mixed farming, intercropping), or of other unaccounted-for sources of risk (i.e. intergroup raiding and warfare).

Researchers investigated the variation of land tenure systems across forager societies using the economic defensibility model. The study attempted to explain the variation in tenure systems across 30 hunter-gatherer societies. Using data on defense and sharing of resources among groups, and indicators of resource density, resource predictability, and competition for resources, the researchers were unable to explain the variation. This study highlights the vast range of diversity and complexity of foragers subsistence strategies, and proposes that it may be more telling to conceptualize tenure systems among hunter-gatherer societies as assemblages of multiple property regimes. While there was no overall evidence that environmental variables of resource density and predictability explain variation in tenure systems, researchers did find that increasing population density, and greater competition for resources leads to greater territoriality.

This article explores the relationships between habitat and social organization among humans and other species. Diet, technology, group size, home range, mobility, kinship, marital residence, sexual division of labor, mating system, central places, food sharing, and egalitarianism are all considered.

Considerable disagreement exists in regard to the origin and distribution of economic phenomena such as money, slavery, markets, exchange, and imbalanced transfers. Here the author utilizes a worldwide cross-cultural sample of 60 pre-industrial "societies" to empirically test many economic hypotheses, with a focus on distributional mechanisms and institutions.

After noticing that recent archaeological research has found evidence that women in pre-history were probably hunters, the authors use the ethnographic record from 63 foraging populations to explore the role of women in hunting. They explore what proportion of societies expect women to contribute to hunting, if women hunt, what proportion was opportunistic or intentional, whether women hunters were skilled, and whether women hunted with children.

The second and third parts of this book classify the economic systems of foraging and agricultural societies in the SCCS based on correlations between their institutions of property an distribution. These economic types are then examined for relationships with other social, political, demographic, and environmental factors in order to draw tentative conclusions regarding the origins of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. The fourth part of the book uses cross-national data to examine similar associations in industrial/service economies, and is not included here.

This paper seeks to understand how the conflict resolution strategies of indigenous and non-indigenous groups differ in their efficacy. The authors suggest that indigenous methods of conflict resolution are more effective than non-indigenous methods by demonstrating that subjects from the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM) associated with indigenous conflict management (ICM) will co-occur less frequently with OCM terms related to conflict than subjects related to non-ICM. They tested this by selecting OCM subjects that they felt best represented ICM, non-ICM, and instances of conflict and using chi-square tests to show how often these subjects co-occurred. They subsequently split up the "conflict" variable into four forms of conflict in order to show whether any of these forms might be more frequently found associated with ICM or non-ICM subjects. The results showed that conflict subjects were more likely to co-occur with non-ICM subjects, and that sociocultural/interpersonal conflicts were more likely to be associated with ICM subjects, whereas political conflicts were more likely to be associated with non-ICM subjects.