A central issue in anthropology is the process through which political organization (sometimes referred to as cultural complexity) evolves: competing models typically argue for either incremental increases in complexity or larger, non-sequential increases in complexity. Here, the authors evaluate six different models of political evolution, utilizing a phylogenetic approach to analyze the evolution of 84 Austronesian-speaking societies.

The authors test the relationship between ethnolinguistic area and various environmental variables in a cross-cultural sample of hunter-gatherer, pastoral, and agricultural subsistence groups in order to evaluate various hypotheses surrounding the geographic and ecological origins of cultural diversity. They propose that societies which adopted agriculture at the beginning of the Holocene were less directly affected by climate which, combined with the effect of increasing political and cultural complexity, allowed coordination and homogenization of ethnolinguistic groups over a broader swathe of territory.

The researchers utilize a GIS approach in order to examine the relationship between global linguistic distribution and various cultural and environmental factors. The resulting positive association between political complexity and both latitude and language range leads the researchers to propose that large, politically complex entities exert a homogenizing pressure on language. However, the causal link may also be in the other direction, with possession of common language facilitating the creation of more complex political institutions.

Using phylogenetic modeling, the researchers test hypotheses for different sequences of political complexity among South-East Asian and Pacific Austronesian-speaking cultures. The research adds to an existing debate between sequential, incremental political evolution models and non-sequential models with larger increases in complexity. The results suggest support for a more sequential unilinear model.

The authors develop CantoCore, an expansion of Lomax's Cantometrics scheme, in order to code for additional candidate musical universals. No musical feature occurs with absolute universality, but several features occur with statistically significant frequency after controlling for historical relatedness, and an additional set of features were found to be universally related to each other. The authors highlight the role of these features in human coordination and cohesion, as well as their their utility to the fields of musical cognition and evolution.

The authors investigate whether moralizing high gods and, more generally, supernatural punishment precede, sustain, or follow political complexity. The cultural traits at hand are mapped onto phylogenetic trees representing the descent and relatedness of 96 Austronesian cultures.

This article explores the possible relationship between the cultural evolution of language, music, and genetic variation beyond the level of language families. Due to their linguistic diversity, the authors use a sample of 14 Northeast Asian societies with matching information on their music, genetics, and linguistic patterns. The variables measuring language are lexicon, phonology, and grammar. Then, the authors compare each variable's relationship to music and genetic variation. The results only show a significant correlation between grammar and genetic variation.

Using the compiled database "Seshat: Global History Databank," researchers sampled 30 societies from 10 distinct regions of the world, testing 51 variables that were condensed into 9 "complex characteristic" variables. Researchers tested for correlates in how societies evolve structurally. Utilizing principal component analysis it was demonstrated that the complex characteristic variables were strongly associated, leading to theorization of structural and social evolution predictability.