Jared Diamond previously argued that the East-West orientation of Eurasia allowed for the spread of substantial cultural, political, technological, and military innovations, due to environmental homogeneity across the continent. The authors of this article test this theory through quantitative analyses. Their results suggest that ecology can indeed influence the potential for cultural transmission, consistent with Diamond's theory. However, the authors do not find support for Eurasia having lower environmental barriers to cultural transmission in comparison to other continents.

In this article, the authors seek to determine cross-culturally valid predictors of dominant types of human subsistence around the world. They did this by formulating multiple models that incorporate different combinations of environmental, geographic, and social factors. These models were then used to test various hypotheses posed throughout the anthropological literature surrounding factors that determine dominant subsistence strategies.

The article discusses how our understanding of dog-human bonds, dog behavior, and dog cognition is limited to Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) societies, and the question of whether associations between dogs and humans are representative worldwide. The study collected data on the function and perception of dogs in 124 globally distributed societies using the eHRAF cross-cultural database. The results showed that keeping dogs for multiple purposes and/or employing dogs for highly cooperative or high investment functions is associated with closer dog-human bonds, increased primary caregiving, decreased negative treatment, and attributing personhood to dogs. The study challenges the notion that all dogs are the same and opens questions about how function and associated cultural correlates could fuel departures from the ‘typical’ behavior and social-cognitive skills we commonly associate with our canine friends.

The article discusses how our understanding of dog-human bonds, dog behavior, and dog cognition is limited to Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) societies, and the question of whether associations between dogs and humans are representative worldwide. The study collected data on the function and perception of dogs in 124 globally distributed societies using the eHRAF cross-cultural database. The results showed that keeping dogs for multiple purposes and/or employing dogs for highly cooperative or high investment functions is associated with closer dog-human bonds, increased primary caregiving, decreased negative treatment, and attributing personhood to dogs. The study challenges the notion that all dogs are the same and opens questions about how function and associated cultural correlates could fuel departures from the ‘typical’ behavior and social-cognitive skills we commonly associate with our canine friends.

The article discusses how our understanding of dog-human bonds, dog behavior, and dog cognition is limited to Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) societies, and the question of whether associations between dogs and humans are representative worldwide. The study collected data on the function and perception of dogs in 124 globally distributed societies using the eHRAF cross-cultural database. The results showed that keeping dogs for multiple purposes and/or employing dogs for highly cooperative or high investment functions is associated with closer dog-human bonds, increased primary caregiving, decreased negative treatment, and attributing personhood to dogs. The study challenges the notion that all dogs are the same and opens questions about how function and associated cultural correlates could fuel departures from the ‘typical’ behavior and social-cognitive skills we commonly associate with our canine friends.

Inter-group variation is greater in humans than in any other animal, and scholars continue to debate the cause of this diversity. Two competing explanatory models of human variation emphasize either (1) ecological differences and "evoked" culture or (2) population-level effects of cultural transmission. The former emphasizes mechanisms that operate within a single generation, while the latter emphasizes cumulative cultural history operating over many generations. To test these competing models, the authors measured the relative power of ecological variables as compared to culture history to predict behavioral variation in 172 western North American tribes. Culture history is subdivided into culture phylogeny (based on language phylogeny) and spatial distance.

The authors investigate the relationship between linguistic diversity and various environmental and spatial variables associated with biodiversity. Most of these variables predict linguistic diversity variably across different continents, and more so within Africa and extended Asia (Asia, the Pacific, and Australia) than within Europe and the Americas. This divide is theorized to be a result of differences in demography and impact of colonialism between the two global regions. However, two environmental factors, landscape roughness and density of river systems, are found to be significant predictors across all global regions. The authors suggest that, as in processes of speciation, rough terrain and watercourses both create physical barriers between which languages can develop in isolation while, in the case of river junctions, also providing transportation routes whereby hybrid languages can occasionally manifest.

Humans, just like other mammals, tend to allow greater sexual freedom for men rather than women. Furthermore, females are burdened with the majority of parenting. Do parenting costs limit sexual unrestrictedness to a different degree for males and females? The authors find that across 48 cultures, as women’s parenting costs decreased through improved physiological and economic conditions, women’s sexual unrestrictedness increased.

Humans, just like other mammals, tend to allow greater sexual freedom for men rather than women. Furthermore, females are burdened with the majority of parenting. Do parenting costs limit sexual unrestrictedness to a different degree for males and females? The authors find that across 48 cultures, as women’s parenting costs decreased through improved physiological and economic conditions, women’s sexual unrestrictedness increased.

The researchers, using principal component analysis, generalized additive models across 12 agriculture origin locations, and a model predicting hunter-gatherer population density, evaluate hindcasted population density trends to suggest predictors of the development of agriculture. Using domestication as an indicator of agriculture, they test 3 competing hypotheses regarding agriculture development. Their results are consistent with the "surplus" hypothesis, indicating that agriculture arose as population densities increased along with environmental capabilities.