The authors investigate whether moralizing high gods and, more generally, supernatural punishment precede, sustain, or follow political complexity. The cultural traits at hand are mapped onto phylogenetic trees representing the descent and relatedness of 96 Austronesian cultures.

In order to explore the evolution of mutually beneficial transactions in large societies, this experimental study gathered data on the way people in societies of different subsistence types played games simulating interactions with anonymous others. The degree of fairness displayed by different players was correlated with measures of large-scale institutions, such as a market or world religion, that were present in a player’s society. Results suggest that “modern prosociality is not solely the product of an innate psychology, but also reflects norms and institutions that have emerged over the course of human history” (1480).

This study examines costly punishment behavior across cultures. Authors conducted economic games in a variety of societies and found that costly punishment behavior occurs to varied degrees across cultures. Results also suggest that altruistic behavior is associated with costly punishment behavior.

This article presents the results of economic behavior experiments conducted on members of 15 small scale societies. Although three different economic experiments were conducted, findings focus on the results of the "Ultimatum Game." The authors found that no society adhered to behavior predicted by the "selfishness axiom" which suggests that individuals will behave in a way that maximizes their own gain. Authors also discuss possible predictors of behavioral variation within and between groups.

The social control hypothesis suggests that ritual human sacrifice may have played an important role in the evolution of social stratification, functioning to legitimize class-based power distinctions by pairing displays of ultimate authority with supernatural justifications. Authors test this hypothesis about human sacrifice with a phylogenetic analysis of 93 Austronesian cultures.

The researchers introduce the Pulotu database to readers, reviewing its function and role in future research. Researchers demonstrate the utility of the database by testing for headhunting cross-culturally. Findings include the presence of headhunting practices across proto-Austronesian cultures.

The present study examines 70 Austronesian cultures to test whether political hierarchy, population size, and social inequality have been influential in the conversion of populations to Christianity. Cultural isolation and year of missionary arrival are control variables. Using phylogenetic generalized least squares (PGLS), the researchers test the effect of the three predictor variables on conversion to Christianity and also conduct a multivariate analysis with all variables. The results do not offer support for what is expected by top-down and bottom-up theories of conversion but instead for the general dynamics of cultural transmission.

Observing that rates of polygynous marriage tend to increase with wealth difference, the authors of this paper attempt to understand why monogamous marriage has flourished in Europe and other parts of the world even as wealth differences have expanded. The authors theorize that monogamous marriage promotes the success of the groups that employ the practice by suppressing intra-group competition and that this is what has happened in Europe. Subsequently, the authors test hypotheses that are implicated in this theory.

Jorgensen revisits Driver’s 1974 study of the various explanations for kin avoidances which mainly focused on North America, and broadens the scope to include a world-wide sample. In his work he brings up what he believes to be flaws in the comparative method, arguing that Driver’s work did not properly test for the independence of the correlations. Jorgensen revisits over 50 different variables in order to test for ‘all relationships among all categories.’ Overall, the results that he found agreed with Driver’s work, but presented a more transparent overview. See the article for the individual clusterings of Phi Coefficients for the set of 21 variables set as well as the set of 50 variables.

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.