An earlier study (Minturn & Lambert 1964) found a nonsignificant association between multifamily households and social permisiveness. This article re-tests that association using Barry et al.'s ratings for child socialization practices, finding that having several families in one house tends to decrease socialization pressure on children.

The ability of adults to digest lactose is common only in populations of European and circum-Mediterranean origin, a distribution thought to be a result of genetic adaptation to drinking milk from domestic livestock. Two additional hypotheses have been proposed to explain the distribution of high lactose digestion capacity: (1) supplemental calcium in high-latitude populations prone to vitamin D deficiency and (2) maintenance of water and electrolytes in the body in highly arid environments. However, these hypotheses are confounded by the shared ancestry of populations whose lactose digestion capability has been tested. Therefore, the authors test all three hypotheses using a phylogenetic comparative method for 62 cultures.

This study tests for a relationship between subsistence type and fertility using phylogenetic and statistical analyses. The authors find a clear relationship between dependence on agriculture and fertility among non-permanently settled groups.

This study presents a phylogenetic approach to the work of Hartung (1982) on the relationship between inheritance and marriage patterns. Results indicate that polygyny is associated with male-biased inheritance.

This article presents a phylogenetic approach to studying sexual dimorphism of stature. Results show a significant association between sexual division of labor and sexual dimorphism of stature.

Evolutionary anthropologists have long emphasized the puzzle of short inter-birth intervals, extended childhoods, and long post-reproductive lives of humans, in particular the problem it poses for raising children. While there is agreement that mothers receive assistance from kin to offset the high costs of raising children, opinion is equivocal as to which kin help and to what extent they help. Here the authors review 45 studies from historical and contemporary natural fertility populations to assess the effects of various types of kin on child survival rates.

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.

Through phylogenetic comparison, Holden and Mace explore the relationship between descent and cattle among a sample of 68 Bantu/Bantoid-speaking populations in Africa. The authors posit that when matrilineal cultures adopt cattle, they become patrilineal. Possible theories are offered to explain trends and variation in the data.

Using linguistic trees as models of population history in combination with ethnographic data on kinship, the authors of the present study reconstruct post-marital residence rules of early Austronesian societies. Analyses include a Markov-chain Monte Carlo comparative method implemented in a Bayesian phylogenetic framework.