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.

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.

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 authors test the relationship between ethnolinguistic area and various environmental variables in a cross-cultural sample of hunter-gatherer, pastoral, and agricultural subsistence groups in order to evaluate various hypotheses surrounding the geographic and ecological origins of cultural diversity. They propose that societies which adopted agriculture at the beginning of the Holocene were less directly affected by climate which, combined with the effect of increasing political and cultural complexity, allowed coordination and homogenization of ethnolinguistic groups over a broader swathe of territory.

The researchers utilize a GIS approach in order to examine the relationship between global linguistic distribution and various cultural and environmental factors. The resulting positive association between political complexity and both latitude and language range leads the researchers to propose that large, politically complex entities exert a homogenizing pressure on language. However, the causal link may also be in the other direction, with possession of common language facilitating the creation of more complex political institutions.