This article employs cross-national and cross-cultural methods to investigate whether pathogen stress is a direct determinant of authoritarianism. The study controls on other factors such as famine, warfare, and malnutrition and evaluates alternative causal models.

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 is a quantitative analysis of 592 participants from 8 societies. The study examines a number of theories about what predicts moralistic religions, including life history theory. Findings suggest that there is no evident relationship between these life history predictions and the religious beliefs regarding moralism.

The data in this study attempts to address questions related to cross-cultural similarities and differences in human-pet dynamics. A distribution of pet types across a cross-cultural sample is provided, along with descriptions of the functions and treatment of pets cross-culturally.

Drawing from cultural evolution theory, the authors develop a model to explain the origin and evolution of productive organizations (organizations specialized in producing goods and services to satisfy human needs). They propose that productive organizations have two characteristics: exclusive membership and enhanced social learning within the organization. They find their predictions supported in a global sample of premodern societies.

Inter-group variation is greater in humans than in any other animal, and scholars continue to debate the cause of this diversity. Two competing explanatory models of human variation emphasize either (1) ecological differences and "evoked" culture or (2) population-level effects of cultural transmission. The former emphasizes mechanisms that operate within a single generation, while the latter emphasizes cumulative cultural history operating over many generations. To test these competing models, the authors measured the relative power of ecological variables as compared to culture history to predict behavioral variation in 172 western North American tribes. Culture history is subdivided into culture phylogeny (based on language phylogeny) and spatial distance.

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.

Previous research into the origins of human violence and warfare has oftentimes been inconclusive and controversial. This paper examines two alternative theories as to the evolution of human violence using archaeological records on sharp force trauma (SFT) and blunt force trauma (BFT). The study is limited to 13 different California ethnolinguistic groups. Researchers find that violence is not predicted by sociopolitical complexity, but rather by environmental productivity. This supports the idea that in contexts of resource scarcity, the perceived benefits to engage in lethal aggression may outweigh perceived costs.

This article examines gender differences in relation to content of dreams. Results show that there are statistically significant differences in dream content by gender.

This paper presents a series of predictions that are derived from the assumption that kin selection an altruism are evolved components of human social behavior. Several examples from the anthropological literature that pertain to these predictions are discussed. Data presented are mostly consistent with the predictions.