This article examines whether intergenerational wealth transmission perpetuates inequality among hunter-gatherers. The authors consider three types of wealth: embodied, material, and relational. Empirical analysis of wealth transmission in five cultures suggests that, in many cases, a parent’s wealth is associated with a child’s life chances. Gini coefficients suggest that hunter-gatherer cultures have low to moderate wealth inequality overall: very low by current world standards but not non-existent.

This study examines the patterns in associations between cultural traits. Factor analysis and hierarchical cluster analyses were employed to identify various dimensions of culture. Regional patterns and theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

This article suggests that societies are not passive receivers of traits, but rather that diffusion is purposive, sensitive to its environmental outcomes and thus influenced by trait content. Findings support this hypothesis.

This article investigates variables related to suicide in preindustrial societies. Bivariate analyses indicate associations between rates of suicide and religion, kinship, political and economic integration, expression of emotions, and importance of pride. Multiple regression identifies three key predictors of suicide: the major economic activity, rules concerning the expression of emotions, and the importance of pride and shame.

This article examines sex differences in sports and games of strategy and chance. Results indicated large differences in participation by gender, especially for combat and hunting sports and in patriarchal societies. The possible cross-cultural universality of this trend is discussed.

This paper seeks to understand why hunter-gatherer settlements become less dense as their populations increase, as opposed to the tendency of sedentary settlements to become denser with increasing population. They propose that settlement density is dependent on mitigating proximity costs at low settlement sizes, and movement costs at larger settlement sizes, and that these proximity costs act strongly upon hunter-gatherer groups, as they do not have the social structures or material technologies to alleviate them, thereby creating less dense settlements. The authors construct a model based upon this theory, and then test it using a cross-cultural database of 1,760 hunter-gatherer camps from 112 different cultural groups. They find that hunter-gatherer groups become less dense as settlement size increases, but as movement costs become more important than proximity costs, the rate at which they become less dense diminishes. They also find that settlements begin to become denser when there is food security and proximity costs are mitigated, indicating that domestic food production is not necessarily requisite for settlement densification and that densification may have emerged in tandem with the advent of agriculture, as opposed to as a result of it.

This study builds on a previous study of games by Roberts, Arth and Bush (1959) and offers a conflict interpretation of game involvement. Several significant relationships are observed between game type and child training variables.

Authors investigate the cross-cultural correlates of games of chance. They advance a "conflict-enculturation" model to explain why individuals choose to engage in games of chance in particular (as opposed to games of strategy or physical skill). They suggest that games of chance are linked to cultures with antecedent conflict and/or feelings of powerlessness in the presence of uncertainty; both are psychological stressors whose effects may be assuaged by play with uncertainty models in the form of games of chance.

The authors of this article evaluate how the legacies of early statehood (i.e., precolonial centralized ethnic groups) in Africa continue to impact democratic governance. They find a positive relationship between early states and support for autocratic rule, especially in former British colonies that were highly centralized prior to colonization. They suggest that the transmission of political and cultural norms play an important role in the support for autocracies.

This study explores predictors of variation in two dimensions of marital residence patterns among hunter-gatherers: 1) the tendency toward patrilocality versus matrilocality and 2) the tendency toward unilocality versus bilocality.