HRAF Academic Quarterly, Vol 2025-01

Francine Barone

This summary features some of the exciting research accomplished using HRAF data from the eHRAF World Cultures and eHRAF Archaeology databases as well as Explaining Human Culture (EHC), Teaching eHRAF, and other open access materials from HRAF. If you would like to stay informed of the latest eHRAF research, sign up here to receive an email when our next summary is available.

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From the field of cultural evolution, we are starting off 2025 with an open access corpus of musical and vocal features across cultures; cross-cultural analyses of knotting traditions over time and space; what problem-solving computer systems and the human brain may have in common; and a debate on lethal intergroup conflict in human evolution. This edition also features a look at anthropologist Jack Goody’s contributions to comparative analysis in British social anthropology and his interest in the HRAF files. Three recent graduate theses present new and exciting research on the cross-cultural use of poison; art, aesthetics and evolution; and death in the Irish and British Mesolithic. In addition, HRAF researchers presented a series of papers at the Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon in March 2025. The HRAF panel, “What’s New in Cross-Cultural Research?”, focused on the cultural effects of natural hazards and the cultural variation in reproductive knowledge.

Featured Publications

The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, a global corpus of vocal music (preprint)
Mila Bertolo, Martynas Snarskis, Thanos Kyritsis, Lidya Yurdum, Constance Bainbridge, S. Atwood, Courtney Hilton, Anya Keomurjian, Judy S. Lee, Alex Mackiel, Vanessa Mak, Mijoo Shin, Alma M. Bitran, Dor Shilton, Lana Delasanta, Hang (Heather) Do, Jenna Lang, Tenaaz Irani, Jayanthiny Kangatharan, Kevin Lafleur, Nashua Malko, Quentin Atkinson, Manvir Singh, Samuel Mehr

A comprehensive cognitive science requires broad sampling of human behavior to justify general inferences about the mind. For example, the field of psycholinguistics relies on a rich history of comparative study, with many available resources that systematically document many languages. Surprisingly, despite a longstanding interest in questions of universality and diversity, the psychology of music has few such resources. Here, we report the Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, an open-access corpus of vocal music (n = 1007 song excerpts), with accompanying metadata detailing each song’s region of origin, language (of 413 languages represented here), and one of 10 behavioral contexts (e.g., work, storytelling, mourning, lullaby, dance). The corpus is designed to sample both broadly, with a large cross-section of societies and languages; and deeply, with many songs representing three well-studied language families (Atlantic-Congo, Austronesian, and Indo-European). This design facilitates direct comparison of musical and vocal features across cultures, principled approaches to sampling stimuli for experiments, and evaluation of models of the cultural evolution of song. In this paper we describe the corpus and provide two proofs of concept, demonstrating its utility. We show that (1) the acoustical forms of songs are predictive of their behavioral contexts, including in previously unstudied contexts (e.g., children’s play songs); and (2) similarities in acoustic content of songs across cultures are predictable, in part, by the relatedness of those cultures.

The Ties That Bind: Computational, Cross-cultural Analyses of Knots Reveal Their Cultural Evolutionary History and Significance
Roope O. Kaaronen, Allison K. Henrich, Mikael A. Manninen, Matthew J. Walsh, Isobel Wisher, Jussi T. Eronen, Felix Riede

Integral to the fabric of human technology, knots have shaped survival strategies since their first invention. As the ties that bind, their evolution and diversity have afforded human cultural change and expression. This study examines knotting traditions over time and space. We analyse a sample of 338 knots from 86 ethnographically or archaeologically documented societies over 12 millennia. Utilizing a novel approach that combines knot theory with computational string matching, we show that knotted structures can be precisely represented and compared across cultures. This methodology reveals a staple set of knots that occur cross-culturally, and our analysis offers insights into their cultural transmission and the reasons behind their ubiquity. We discuss knots in the context of cultural evolution, illustrating how the ethnographic and archaeological records suggest considerable know-how in knot-tying across societies spanning from the deep past to contemporary times. The study also highlights the potential of this methodology to extend beyond knots, proposing its applicability to a broader range of string and fibre technologies.

Headmen, shamans, and mothers: Natural and sexual selection for computational services
Edward H. Hagen, Zachary H. Garfield, Aaron D. Lightner

Computer engineers face a dilemma. They must build systems with sufficient resources to solve the most complex problems the systems are expected to solve, but the systems will only need to solve such problems intermittently, resulting in inefficient use of expensive computational resources. This dilemma is commonly resolved with timesharing, networking, multitasking, and other technologies that enable computational resources to be shared with multiple users. The human brain, which evolved to acquire, store, and process information to make beneficial decisions in situations that were periodically complex, is likewise energetically expensive to build and maintain yet plausibly has idle capacity much of the time. We propose that humans evolved to use advantages in information or computational resources to provide computational services to others via a language-based “network” in exchange for payments of various sorts that helped subsidize the energetic costs of the brain. Specifically, we argue that with the Pleistocene transition of Homo to a niche in open habitats with a more meat-based diet, four major selection pressures for knowledge specialists began to act on the human lineage: (1) the need to resolve conflicts and maintain cooperation in larger multilevel societies, which lead to the rise of knowledge-based leaders as decision-making and conflict resolution specialists who were “paid” with increased mating success or resources; (2) the need for greater defense against zoonotic pathogens, which lead to the rise of shamans as medical knowledge specialists, who were “paid” with increased mating success or resources; (3) the greater complexity of mothering with shorter interbirth intervals and longer periods of juvenile dependency, which led to mothers as both decision-making and medical specialists, who were “paid” with increased inclusive fitness; and (4) the need to make more efficient use of an increasingly large and energetically expensive brain.

Robust evidence that mobile hunter-gatherers participated in war: Comment on Fry (2025)
Luke Glowacki

References supporting ethnographic evidence in the form of eHRAF data in his rebuttal of Fry (2025).
It is no exaggeration to say that Fry’s 2013 article shocked a corner of the anthropological world. In a single paper, published in no less than arguably the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, societies such as the Andamanese and Yukaghir, who had long been used as examples of precolonial warfare based on well-known ethnographically authoritative accounts of war, were now being used as evidence that hunter-gatherers generally lacked war. Where had all the warfare gone? How could societies famous for war suddenly show that foragers not only lacked war, but that war had been “selected against”? The answer I attempted to show in my EHB paper and will show below is that Fry’s study was not designed to assess the importance of intergroup conflict among the societies in his sample, much less mobile foragers generally. Because his study was not designed to assess the importance of intergroup conflict, the inferences derived from it are not only questionable but insofar as they pertain to the role of war in human evolution, they are meaningless. War may or may not be important in human evolution, but Fry’s 2013 paper cannot reasonably assess the evolutionary importance of war because the data it relies on are not constructed to assess the relationships hunter-gatherers had with other foragers.

Expanding Interests: Jack Goody’s Scholarship from Ethnography and Social Anthropology to Comparative Sociology and World History
Han F. Vermeulen

Vermeulen explains British anthropologist Jack Goody’s belief in the importance of comparative analysis in anthropology and his interest in the Human Relations Area Files (pp. 8-9):

More than anyone else in his generation, Goody added comparative research to the agenda of British social anthropologists. Founding fathers such as Tylor, Bastian and Frazer had established the comparative method in late nineteenth-century anthropology. George Peter Murdock proposed it as a baseline for cultural anthropology in the United States and created the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University in 1949. In Britain, few professional anthropologists pursued comparison in the middle of the twentieth century. In contrast, Goody’s study of mortuary rituals and property transmission in two LoDagaa communities was comparative. The published version of his thesis addressed ‘social anthropologists working in an unfamiliar society’ (1962: 1) but stated ambitiously in the first sentence: ‘Fieldwork apart, the development of a sociology that is not simply limited to Western Europe requires three things: first, hypotheses, second, the comparative analysis to test them, and, third, the conceptual tools to build them.’ Yet, while Goody asserted the need for comparative analysis, he admitted that he had no experience with in-the-field comparative research: ‘the only instrument I know of that might have helped,’ namely, the Human Relations Area Files, ‘was not available to me during my research’ (1962: v–vi). […]

In 1967 he was awarded a two-year grant from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) for ‘the comparative study of African institutions employing modern techniques of data processing.’ This project was implemented in 1968-1972 as the SSRC Research Project on a ‘Comparative Study of Institutions, with special reference to Africa’ (Goody, CV of May 1972). As director of the African Studies Centre, Goody hired research assistants, among them Joan Buckley, Barrie Irving and Nicky Tahany. His collection of Comparative Studies in Kinship (1969) included a chapter on ‘Comparative Sociology and the Decolonization of the Social Sciences.’ In 1968, Goody applied for the degree of ScD (Scientiae Doctor), which was awarded in November 1969. A grant provided by the Ford-Rockefeller Foundation for a comparative investigation of population and inheritance was acquired in 1971–72. By this time, he had persuaded the Cambridge department to subscribe to the Human Relations Area Files.

Graduate & Doctoral Theses

The Cross-Cultural Use of Poison by Hunter-Gatherers
Niko A. Tapia (MA Thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia)

Human beings are extremely proficient at utilizing every available tool in their surrounding environment in creative ways. Poison is a perfect example of these creative solutions being directed at the ever-present problem of extracting food from the landscape. This comparative analysis examines how poison is used to assist in food extraction technologies of the groups from Lewis Binford’s dataset of 339 hunter-gatherer groups (information on poison use or not is available for 118 of these groups). Using this categorical data, I address the research question: what is the relationship between plant diversity, latitude, and the productive use of poison to aid in traditional food extraction? This study examines how traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) plays a role in the use of poison as a resource to aid in food acquisition, as well as how the community protects itself from the danger of accidental poisonings. This paper aims to shed light on the transmission of information within these groups on how this resource can remain effective without being a detriment. While several instances of poison use for hunting purposes are well known, such as the Hadza and various groups in Amazonia, my aim to understand how geographically widespread this hunting practice is. The study also touches on Optimal Foraging Theory and how poison assists hunters in having tools that are more lethal, and because of this heightened lethality, they are more efficient at extracting food from the environment. My initial hypothesis was that latitude would be a strong predictor for where we would find poison use, in particular lower latitudinal regions. I hypothesized that plant diversity could have some predictive abilities for poison use, however, my assumption was it would be far weaker than latitude. Poison use is a well spread hunting technology around the globe, out of 118 groups 83 (70 percent) use poison while 35 (29.6 percent) do not. Poison is not a localized hunting technology, but a widespread cross culturally used technology.

Thinking Evolutionary Aesthetics Empirically: A Dissertation Exploring Empirical Approaches to Questions of Art, Aesthetics, and Evolution
Brady Fullerton (PhD Thesis, University of Guelph)

Evolutionary aesthetics is a field of interdisciplinary research that explores the relationship between human aesthetic sensibilities and evolutionary biology. This field has gained popularity in the last several decades with many competing theories. Authors such as Denis Dutton and Stephen Davies have offered theoretical comparative accounts of the various positions within evolutionary aesthetics. However, relatively little work has been done comparing these theories empirically. This is not to say that the field of evolutionary aesthetics is devoid of evidence-based approaches. Most of the theories advanced in evolutionary aesthetics make an appeal to biological or cultural evidence. However, they typically fall short of any sort of rigorous empirical test. In this dissertation I explore the field of evolutionary aesthetics using a decidedly empirical approach by statistically analyzing cross-cultural ethnographic data and by employing cultural phylogenies based on linguistic relationships. Chapter 2 presents a cross-cultural statistical test of Ellen Dissanayake’s evolutionary aesthetic theory that art “brings us together” by directing communal attention. My results in this chapter are broadly supportive of Dissanayake’s evolutionary aesthetic theory. Chapter 3 builds on my cross-cultural approach to Dissanayake by pursuing a phylogenetic analysis of her evolutionary aesthetic theory. This approach serves as both a replication study (using the same variables from Chapter 2) and a novel method analysis (using different variables from Chapter 2). The results of this chapter are less conclusive and suggest the limitations of certain empirical approaches. In Chapter 4, I outline a five-step methodology for approaching positions within evolutionary aesthetics in order to assess them for empirical testability. This methodology builds on the lessons learned in the previous two chapters in order to foster future empirical work in evolutionary aesthetics. After outlining this five-step methodology I apply it to the evolutionary aesthetic work of Ellen Dissanayake, Geoffrey Miller, and Steven Pinker. These applications of the five-step methodology serve to define both the theoretical and empirical work necessary for an empirical approach to evolutionary aesthetics as well as creating fertile ground for future research.

Understanding the experience of death in the Irish and British Mesolithic
Elizabeth Mallonee (MA Thesis, University College Dublin)

When a person dies, their death is felt by the whole community. It not only creates a ‘hole’ in the social structure that the person once filled but also creates a body in a liminal state, a corpse, that is neither a living member of the community nor fully removed from society. To work through the issues of closure – for both the person’s role in society and the corpse – funerary rituals are employed. These ritualised responses to death allow the living to ‘experience’ death. This project aims to explore how the people of Mesolithic Britain and Ireland experienced death through the handing of a corpse. The known human remains dated to the Mesolithic in these locations are scarce, and even fewer are found in a recognisable mortuary context. To do this I have taken a three-step approach. First, I have researched archaeological records for human bone sites directly dated to the Mesolithic. Additionally, I have created a catalogue of up-to-date sites with human bone directly dated to the Mesolithic. These sites are categorised by context: cave, cremation, water/floodplain, open-air and midden. Second, I have created a timeline putting each site into chronological order to see what mortuary behaviours are happening over time. Third, I have conducted a cross-cultural analysis of recorded hunting and gathering groups that exhibit similar mortuary behaviour. As death is one of the only universal human experiences, it is important to understand how this emotional process may have been conceptualised and experienced.

Related presentation:

HRAF Research

What’s New in Cross-Cultural Research? (SCCR)
Panel Presented at the 85th Society for Applied Anthropology Annual Meeting in Portland, Oregon, March 25-29, 2025

Chair: Ian Skoggard

Overview: The power of cross-cultural research (CCR) lies in its use of rich ethnographic data and rigorous scientific methods to produce general theories of human behavior accessible to a broader scientific community. The last thirty years have seen a nearly four-fold increase in CCR studies. This panel highlights some recent studies, focusing on the cultural effects of natural hazards and the cultural variation in reproductive knowledge. Specifically, papers discuss a new set of variables that capture the dimensions of natural hazards; the effects of hazards on religiosity, sharing behavior, community cohesion, and political authority; and cross-cultural variation in the transmission of reproductive knowledge.

Papers

Reproductive Wisdom Across Cultures: Using the Probability Sample Files to Understand Sources of Pregnancy Advice
Michelle Escasa-Dorne, Sharon Marie Young, K. Chimene Gecewicz

Peripartum mothers in high-income countries often seek reproductive health information from physicians, the internet, and social circles, while in smaller societies, experienced women traditionally provide guidance. To examine ethnographic variations in pregnancy-related advice, we analyzed data from the electronic Human Relations Area Files, using the Probability Sample Files and the key term, “Pregnancy.” We documented the type and target of advice, along with the identified sources. Our findings reveal that while the advice received is quite variable, most advice centers on behavioral practices for fetal and infant health and wellness, with older women frequently cited as key sources of information.

Context Matters: Understanding the Ethnographic Dimensions of Hazards
Samantha King, Anj Droe, Cynthiann Hecklesmiller, Carol Ember

Understanding the human impacts of environmental hazards is a growing concern with the acceleration of climate change. Ethnographies offer an insider perspective into how hazards unfold and the significance of events on lives and livelihoods. Yet the literature is highly fragmented and empirical findings are rarely scaled up beyond the local level. This paper outlines a new cross-cultural approach to the ethnographic study of hazards and presents research findings that describe and analyze the global experience of hazards based on a sample of 132 societies.

To Share or Not to Share?: Resource Stress, Natural Hazards, and Beyond-Household Sharing Customs
Carol R. Ember, Ian Skoggard, Bejamin Gelbart

In previous cross-cultural research, we theorized and found support for the theory that beyond household food and labor sharing customs would be particularly adaptive in the face of resource stress, including food-destroying natural hazards. In our current grant project, we have coded dimensions of individual hazard events, such as severity, predictability, speed of onset and whether the hazards were mostly food-destroying or not. After coding individual hazard events for each society, we developed society-wide scores so that we could explore whether these dimensions might help us predict sharing customs. We find that some of these dimensions help us predict daily and seasonal sharing customs.

A Cross-Cultural Examination of the Relevance of Ecological Dimensions of Hazards for Political Leadership
Eric C. Jones

Hazards present challenges to leaders to stay in power and to support their populations. However, ecologically, what dimensions of hazards set the parameters of those challenges? We know that hazards—that can turn into disasters—are disruptive to governance because of the impact on individuals and societal structures and functions. We have found previously that more hazards result in more exclusionary approaches to leadership. To supplement that finding, we examined over 100 societies in terms of how predictability, speed of onset, diversity, and severity of hazards add to our understanding in variation in the strategies of leaders to maintain power

Political Participation and Community Cohesion as Mediators of Wellbeing Following Hazard Events
Ann Nguyen, Eric C. Jones

Using ethnographic data gathered from over a hundred societies, we analyze how political participation and community cohesion serve as mediators on societal wellbeing following different hazard events. We explore various outcomes of resilience that contribute to loose or strong community cohesion and political participation, such as intergenerational commitment, treatment of children, defensive capabilities, and response to widespread hunger. Comparing these outcomes across societies, we model levels of wellbeing following hazard events that affect living conditions and daily activities.

Effects of Warfare and Natural Hazards on Religiosity
Ian Skoggard, Louise Toutee, Isana Raja

Preliminary analysis of a small sample of ethnographic cases shows that natural hazards and warfare, including aggression and violence variables, have the opposite effects on ritual behavior and religiosity, defined as belief in the supernatural. In this paper we present the results from an analysis of a larger sample size, controlling for social complexity and including multiple dimensions of hazards, such as severity, predictability and speed of onset. In the paper, we present a more nuanced theory of the relationships between weather, warfare, violence and religious belief and practices, based on the combined Standard Cross-Cultural Sample and Probability Sample File.

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References

Bertolo, M., M. Snarskis, T. Kyritsis, et al. 2025. The Expanded Natural History of Song Discography, a global corpus of vocal music (available on-line: https://osf.io/d2ftg_v1, accessed 9 March 2025).

Fullerton, B. 2025. Thinking Evolutionary Aesthetics Empirically: A Dissertation Exploring Empirical Approaches to Questions of Art, Aesthetics, and Evolution. University of Guelph (available on-line: https://hdl.handle.net/10214/28872, accessed 21 February 2025).

Glowacki, L. 2025. Robust evidence that mobile hunter-gatherers participated in war: Comment on Fry (2025). Evolution and Human Behavior 46, 106658 (available on-line: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1090513825000078, accessed 17 March 2025).

Hagen, E. H., Z. H. Garfield & A. D. Lightner 2025. Headmen, shamans, and mothers: Natural and sexual selection for computational services. Evolution and Human Behavior 46, 106651 (available on-line: https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1090513824001272, accessed 3 April 2025).

Kaaronen, R. O., A. K. Henrich, M. A. Manninen, et al. 2025. The Ties That Bind: Computational, Cross-cultural Analyses of Knots Reveal Their Cultural Evolutionary History and Significance. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 1–17 (available on-line: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/ties-that-bind-computational-crosscultural-analyses-of-knots-reveal-their-cultural-evolutionary-history-and-significance/B35E9C2DB89FA3C81F58F309B8F754FA#, accessed 14 March 2025).

Mallonee, E. 2024. Understanding the experience of death in the Irish and British Mesolithic: Highly commended, Master’s thesis prize. Hunter Gatherer Research 10, 77–118 (available on-line: http://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2024.31, accessed 21 January 2025).

Tapia, N. A. 2024. The Cross-Cultural Use of Poison by Hunter-Gatherers. M.A., University of Missouri – Columbia, United States — Missouri (available on-line: https://www.proquest.com/docview/3142111094/abstract/A92235DA7A694D61PQ/1, accessed 21 January 2025).

Vermeulen, Han F., 2025. “Expanding Interests: Jack Goody’s Scholarship from Ethnography and Social Anthropology to Comparative Sociology and World History”, in Bérose – Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie, Paris.

 

Photo credits

Beige Analog Compass by Ylanite Koppens from Pexels
Education concept by manusapon kasosod from Getty Images
Musician in Kimono Playing Koto by majopez
A working mother carrying her child in a back sling by Ammad Rasool from Pexels
Poisonous mushroom by xxmmxx from Getty Images