This article takes a materialist approach to the evolution of ideology in human culture.This article examines the possible coevolution of sociocultural subsystems. The author emphasizes ideological variables and their relationship to technological and social-structural subsystems. Analysis supports a process of coevolution, which the author suggests refutes broad claims of cultural particularism.

This article examined the presence of ostensive-communicative behaviors in educational storytelling within foraging cultures. Ostensive communication includes prosody and gestures used to direct attention to something or someone. The author analyzed 14 behaviors of ostensive communication and tested whether they co-occur with the transmission of knowledge in storytelling. All 53 forager cultures examined demonstrated the use of 2 or more of those communicative behaviors in oral storytelling. This supports the author’s claim of ostensive-communicative behavior as a universal pedagogical tool in forager cultures.

This article examines resource problems and warfare in a sample of societies from eastern Africa. The frequency and predictability of resource problems are examined, as are two other dimensions of warfare: resource-taking and commission of atrocities. Differences between state and nonstate societies, as well as pacified and non-pacified societies, are also examined and shown to affect associations between resource and warfare variables.

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 present examination utilizes life history theory to explain how adolescence may have been transformed in recent times by mass education. The researchers review existing literature and also look at 186 pre-industrial societies from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample to establish a baseline as to how adolescence was viewed and marked. The findings reveal adolescence is an essential period for biological and sociocultural development in the past as well as the present.

Regional and worldwide distributions of several cultural characteristics are presented. Relationships between different cultural variables accounting for regional variation are also discussed. Results show that regional variations are found in most cultural traits.

The authors examine multiple ecological variables as possible predictors of language diversity in North America using path analysis, mechanistic simulation modelling, and geographically weighted regression. They conclude that many of the variables do not predict language diversity, but rather are mediated by population density. The authors also find that the variables' ability to predict is not universal across the continent, but rather more regional.

In this article, the author argues that matrilocality is a form of social organization that is conducive to expansion in tribal societies with smaller populations. Because this organization increases internal solidarity and success in external warfare, the theory suggests that it is best suited for expansion on cultural frontiers by groups with small populations. The author supports this theory with empirical tests on 33 societies and case studies of Bantu and Austronesian expansion.

"The kin selection hypothesis posits that male androphilia evolved because androphilic males invest more in kin, thereby enhancing inclusive fitness." However, increased kin-directed altruism has only been seen in societies that exhibit transgendered male androphilia. To test the validity of the kin selection hypothesis for male androphilia, the authors examine the relationship between ancestral sociocultural conditions, access to kin, and societal reactions to homosexuality and the expression of male androphilia as transgendered or non-transgendered. They find that ancestral sociocultural conditions and bilateral and double descent systems were more common in transgendered than non-transgendered societies.

Researchers tackle the moral gods hypothesis which proposes that moral gods enabled large-scale societies to evolve. They use 414 societies spanning 10,000 years in Seshat: Global History Databank and code 51 measures of social complexity and four measures of moral gods. The findings of the present study challenge the moral gods hypothesis. In the societies studied, complex societies appear to precede moral gods rather than the inverse of moral gods preceding complex societies.