The myths, legends, and folktales of nearby groups tend to more alike than those of more distant groups. Three competing models attempt to explain this distribution of cultural traits: (1) vertical transmission, (2) horizontal transmission, and (3) independent innovation. The authors examine 18 Arctic hunter-gatherer groups to quantify the extent to which geographic distance, cultural ancestry, and effective population size predict overlap in folktale inventories.

This article compares the relative importance of the sun vs. the moon for a world-wide sample of societies. The contexts in which the sun and the moon are found important are also compared.

This article uses factor analysis to identify the key variables underlying the many cross-cultural associations reported by Textor (1967). Twelve factors are identified.

This article investigates paternal warmth, particularly its relationship with parental proximity (often used as its proxy) and maternal warmth. The author also investigates whether paternal warmth, paternal proximity, materal warmth, and socialization for aggression are good predictors of theft, homicide, and violence in offspring.

This study examines different sources of marital stability. Authors find that subsistence dependence between partners provides marital stability and where subsistence dependence is not important, romantic love substitutes as a source of marriage stability.

This article explores the relationship between polygyny and witchcraft accusations in three societies in Kenya. It is argued that the closer co-wives live (have adjacent houses, common yard), the more likely they are to accuse one another of witchcraft. The affects of household structure on population density and intra-household relationships are also discussed.

This article explores the factors that predict rituals of conflict. Hypotheses are derived from Gluckman's analysis of Southeast African rituals of rebellion and are tested against a cross-cultural sample.

This article examines marital residence and sibling coresidence among horticulturalists in the South American lowlands. The authors reject a hypothesis that patrilocality is the defining trait of Amazonian tropical forest culture. Results on horticulturalists are compared with findings on hunter-gatherers: horticulturalists tend to be more uxorilocal. Empirical analysis also suggests that women tend to live with more kin later in life, and in large villages headmen live with more kin than nonheadmen.

This study attempts to reconstruct ancestral marriage practices using hunter-gathers' phylogenies based on mitochondrial DNA sequences. Data suggest that arranged marriages and brideprice/bridewealth likely go back at least to the first modern human migrations out of Africa and that early ancestral human societies probably had low levels of polygyny.

"This article provides a set of codes that rate the starvation and famine experiences of societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. The codes are used to test several theoretical generalizations regarding the underlying causes of famine." Results indicate that seasonal starvation and direct entitlements are the strongest predictors of famine.