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.

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.

This article examines variation in polygyny among foragers. Empirical analysis suggests that the level of male provisioning influences mating systems: higher male contribution to subsistence is associated with monogamy. The influences of pathogen stress, male-male competition, and male coercion are also considered.

This study explores the ways in which human deception has evolved using a sample of 145 societies from eHRAF. After noticing that most research has focused just on tactical deception on humans, this study delved into the categorization and prevalence of human aggressive mimicry. The authors suggest that deception evolved from the context of directing it toward prey. The presence of human aggressive mimicry supports that this is a near-universal cross-cultural practice among hunter-gatherers and the authors highlight the importance of further research on human-nonhuman interactions. The authors posit that this hypothesis could serve as a link between the Social Brain Hypothesis and the Foraging Brain Hypothesis.

This book discusses the role of women cross-culturally. The authors use a cross-cultural sample to examine the differences between men and women in contribution to subsistence as well as the social juxtaposition of the sexes in foraging, horticultural, agricultural, pastoral, and industrial societies.

Using data on 25 ethnolinguistic groups in the Austronesian language family, this study asks: does cooperation in games vary with socio-ecological differences across cultural groups? The authors suggest that cultural groups that cooperate in subsistence, tend to have intergroup conflict and less intragroup conflict, and are less socially stratified are more likely to play cooperative games compared to other groups. While the results support the first three hypotheses, there is insufficient data to support the fourth. The authors conclude that games serve as training ground for group norms and values.

This study tests a broad hypothesis that alcohol is employed to relieve anxiety and feelings of powerlessness. Frequency of drunkenness and drunken brawling were associated with several variables, including supernatural beliefs, political systems, settlement patterns, and division of labor.

The authors of this study investigate both intimate partner violence (IPV) in Africa and tolerance towards it. Merging Demographic and Health Survey data with information from the Ethnographic Atlas, they take into account a wide range of ancestral characteristics that could influence domestic violence today, including precolonial economic roles and marriage traditions. Their findings indicate that societies in which men were dominant in subsistence and/or had androcentric marital practices have more IPV today, and more acceptance of it. They also find an interesting gender gap in acceptance of IPV, in which women are more likely than men to justify domestic violence.

This study explores predictors of variation in two dimensions of marital residence patterns among hunter-gatherers: 1) the tendency toward patrilocality versus matrilocality and 2) the tendency toward unilocality versus bilocality.

A materialist approach is used to study the status of women in hunter-gatherer groups. Techno-ecological factors are tested as predictors of women's status.