This article provides a descriptive account of the prevalence and variation in out-of-body experiences (OOBEs) worldwide. The author suggests that contemporary social science explanations for OOBEs (i.e. social control, crisis, and dream theories) are inadequate. Certain beliefs regarding OOBEs, such as whether they occur and the conditions for their occurrence, were shown to be relatively similar cross-culturally.

This study examines why conflict emerges and how societies resolve it. The authors posit that increasing societal scale and differentiation create more potential for conflict but also more complex forms of conflict resolution. Analysis supports this theory, showing that measures of cultural complexity are positively associated with legal mechanisms for conflict resolution.

Based on prior findings, the present study tests the theory that subsistence type, specifically agricultural level, influences descent type, conjugal formation, and marriage type. All three of the latter variables are predicted to be antecedents of ancestor worship. The author claims support for the theory.

This study takes an economic approach in examining the practice of human sacrifice as it relates to notions of the economic value of human life. Codes are included.

This article suggests that the relationship of monogamy and independent families to societal complexity is best represented by a curvilinear rather than a linear model. Though the variance explained in this relationship is low, it is somewhat increased when variables are scored as dummy variables rather than ordinal.

This article posits a theory of social evolution based on agriculture. The author suggests that a society’s energy source, type of tool materials, and systems of agriculture constitute a variable cluster, and that they are associated with societal scale, economic differentiation, and mode of political integration. Empirical analysis supports this neoevolutionary theory of agriculture.

In asking whether or not there are meaningful universals in music, researchers compiled two catalogs – the Natural History of Song (NHS) Ethnography which contains ethnographic descriptions of song performances collected from eHRAF World Cultures, and the NHS Discography, which contains field recordings of performances of dance, healing, love, and lullaby. Using these two corpora, the study tests a variety of hypotheses about the universality and variability of both music behavior and music form. Specifically, whether there are meaningful universals in meaning and sound. The catalog of published sound recordings was analyzed by machine summaries, listener ratings, and manual transcriptions, which revealed that there were identifiable features of songs which could then predict their primary function cross-culturally. The results as a whole revealed that the existence of music is a cultural universal, and that the variation within music can be characterized by three factors assessing the formality, arousal, and religiosity of the song events. They also found that musical behavior varies more within societies than between them.

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.

The present research investigates food sharing and labor sharing practices of 98 nonindustrial societies. The aims are to: 1) document the frequency and scope of sharing, and 2) test the theory that greater sharing is adaptive in societies subject to more resource stress (including natural hazards).

This article uses the Standard Cross-Cultural Samples to test the relationship between disease and economic growth among sub-Saharan African societies. The authors suggest that a higher disease prevalence limits social integration and economic development since pre-colonial times. The variable measuring economic growth is the complexity of large or impressive structures. The hypotheses are that 1) pathogen stress is negatively correlated to the presence of complex buildings, and 2) pathogen stress is positively correlated to increased ethnic diversity. The results support both hypotheses, and there are additional results, like 1) the negative correlation between pathogen stress and current income per capita and 2) the negative correlation between the increased ethnic diversity and current income per capita. Overall, this article shows the robust relationship between disease and economic development.