This article examines the conditions under which slavery occurs in preindustrial societies. Results suggest that social stratification and the existence of open resources are both necessary conditions for the occurrence of slavery.

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.

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.

Authors examine suicidality within small-scale non-industrial societies. They use ethnographic data to test two models: deCatanzaro's inclusive fitness model and the bargaining model (suicide attempts as a costly signal of need). Limited support is found for deCatanzaro's inclusive fitness model while strong support is found for the bargaining model. Support for deCatanzaro's inclusive fitness model increased with increasing latitude; authors suggest that in climactically-harsher environments, in which elderly or infirm individuals may impose a higher burden on kin, completed suicide occurs more because it might increase inclusive fitness. Fit of and support for each model were differentially age-dependent.

The purpose of this book is to introduce a conceptual and methodological perspective called the "universalist approach," and to use this approach in exploring the pancultural antecedents and affects of parental acceptance-rejection of children,

This article suggests that Spiro's (1965) study on typology of social structure used a biased cross-cultural sample and possibly obscured regional patterns in data. Hypotheses related to marital structure, descent rules, food production and social stratification are tested.

This exploratory study seeks to explain cassava production and processing in Africa by considering cultural, agronomic, and environmental data. After examining the descriptive results of the agricultural and social contexts of cassava use, the authors build upon Boserup's population density model (1965) to analyze their own hypothesized model of cassava's importance among the sampled societies.

This study explores the evolution of family systems in non-industrial agricultural societies based on environmental conditions. First, the authors conduct a multi-evolutionary simulation for each family system: absolute nuclear families (nuclear with unequal inheritance), egalitarian nuclear families (nuclear with equal inheritance), stem families (extended families with unequal inheritance), and community families (extended families with equal inheritance). Second, they use Spearman's rank correlation analyses to assess the relation between the 186 non-industrial societies and the types of inheritance relationships, either parent-child (nuclear or extended) or inter-sibling (strongly biased or equal). The results show that the four core family systems are related to wealth and land resources. Other relevant findings are that low polygyny is related to agricultural societies, higher poverty levels to extended families, and accelerated wealth accumulation to strongly biased inheritance.

In this study, the authors examine pathways to social inequality, specifically social class hierarchy, in 408 non-industrial societies. In a path model, they find social class hierarchy to be directly associated with increased population size, intensive agriculture and large animal husbandry, real property inheritance (unigeniture) and hereditary political succession, with an overall R-squared of 0.45. They conclude that a complex web of effects consisting of environmental variables, mediated by resource intensification, wealth transmission variables, and population size all shape social inequality.

This study asks the following research questions: What are the dynamics of land ownership norms over time? Do these changes follow predetermined trajectories? The authors utilize biogeographical and evolutionary analyses to explore temporal and spatial patterns in land ownership norms within a sample of 73 Bantu societies. For the first component of the research, they test three prominent hypotheses regarding evolutionary trajectories: rectilinear, unilinear, and shift without restriction. For the second component, they use a multi-model inference approach to evaluate three hypotheses regarding the possible spatial patterns of land ownership. The results show evidence for the unilinear trajectory in type, but not with a consistent decrease in group ownership in size. Land ownership is more likely in areas with neighboring landowners and predictable resource productivity, while subsistence type is not significantly correlated with type of land ownership.