The present study examines the effect of social status on stature sexual dimorphism and whether food security acts as a mediator for this relationship. In societies where females have high social status and can exercise mate choice, there is lower stature sexual dimorphism. Food security enhances these results. Conversely, there is greater stature sexual dimorphism in societies where females have low social status and cannot exercise mate choice, especially if there is food insecurity.

Using cross-cultural comparative approaches among 249 cultures, this study explores the uniformity in human preference to concealing mating to others. The research questions guiding this study are: 1) Is the preference to conceal in legitimate mating a 'human universal'? and 2). What evolutionary pressures have originated this uniformity? The author proposes the ‘cooperation maintenance hypothesis’, which is built from three premises: sensory stimuli evoke sexual arousal in witnesses, humans are trying to exert control over their mating partner(s), and there is a need to foster within-group cooperation. This hypothesis suggests that concealing mating serves as a behavioral strategy to simultaneously retain control over mating partner(s) and foster cooperation with others. The author states that more analysis is needed to explain this behavior in other non-human species. The findings show support for the widespread pattern of concealment or attempts at concealment.

This article presents a model of cultural evolution simulating the accumulation of tools in specialized and non-specialized populations under different demographic and environmental scenarios. The model predicts that the relationship between population size and repertoire size is nonlinear and can differ between non-specialized and specialized populations. For small population sizes, the non-specialized populations maintain knowledge better and therefore reach higher average repertoire sizes. In large populations, specialized populations can reach higher average repertoire sizes. This is because non-specialized population's total repertoire size is limited by the capacity of individuals to accumulate knowledge of different skills, while in specialized populations, each individual needs to know only a fraction of the population's repertoire. However, the model also predicts that specialized populations are more susceptible to information loss due to their subdivision of knowledge, and this can be amplified by demographic and environmental factors. The authors also use ethnographic data to analyze the relationship between population size and degree of craft specialization of societies, and how this may be influenced by ecological factors.

This study discusses childcare done by children. While no empirical hypotheses are tested, the authors identify some potential sociocultural and developmental correlates of childcare by children and provide relevant descriptive statistics. Possible correlates include mother-child relationships, conceptions and emergence of childhood stages, organization of play groups, development of social responsibility, sex differences, personality development, cognitive style and cognitive development, motivation and learning.

This article is primarily concerned with formidability theory. This theory suggests that physical strength among men affects their views on social issues because evolutionary physically stronger men would have benefitted from more unequal power arrangements. Thus, the author seeks to investigate an association between height and views on wealth redistribution among European men. Through modeling, such a relationship was found and the author concludes that there is support for this theory.

Through review of the economic literature and cross-cultural analysis of families (nuclear, stem, and complex), the authors show that family type is heterogeneous and argue that types other than nuclear have been largely ignored by economists. They encourage, based on their findings, further research on family structure and the development of better models for household decision making. They use ancestral populations in the ethnographic record to estimate country-level family patterns.

This study is a continuation of previous research on the relationship between stress during infancy and adult height. With a better understanding of the stressors that infants experience and their effects, the authors test whether the relationship between stress and adult height remains significant when accounting for other environmental factors that may influence adult height. Results suggest that the relationship between infant stress and adult height does remain significant. Findings also show a relationship between infant stress and age at menarche.

In previous studies, researchers have observed an increased growth rate in rats that experienced stimulation during infancy. This study examines the relationship between stressful experiences during infancy and adult male stature in humans cross-culturally. Results suggest a strong positive relationship between infant stress and adult male stature.

The author examines modes of marriage and societal organization from a functionalist (general evolutionary) perspective. He focuses on the relationships of subsistence (economic) patterns, settlement patterns, and social complexity to predicting modes of marriage, with particular emphasis on the importance of subsistence as an underlying structural influence upon social patterns.

This textbook chapter outlines relationships between kinship and socialization. It also uses a three-point scale to describe the variation in enculturation processes for a sample of 128 societies. Without presenting a formal test, the author concludes that enculturation (as he measures it) is weaker in industrialized societies than in those without industrialization or urbanization.