This study reveals that in hunting and gathering societies thought to be akin to those of our ancestors, female choice is constained by the control that parents exercise over their daughters. Since parental control is the typical pattern of mate choice among extant foragers, it is likely that this pattern was also prevalent throughout human evolution.

A study of the relationship between older women and their young female kin. Relationships between women's relationships with their mother-in-laws and subsistence contribution, residence, descent, and food preparation are examined. Findings offer significant support for patterns in the relationship between older women and younger female kin.

The present study aims to evaluate correlations of private property from two of Murdock's datasets, one of 147 societies (1981) and the other of 312 societies (1967). Altogether the author tested 146 variables coded by Murdock against variables regarding the ownership of land and of movables drawn from Murdock (1967), Simmons (1937), and Swanson (1960). In total, there were 51 statistically significant correlations between private property ownership and other variables. Additionally, the author summarizes the results from this article and the two that preceded it stating that throughout all of the correlations he ran, the practice of agriculture, the use of cereal grains, and the presence of castes and classes were the only variables that predicted private property in all of the datasets that were utilized.

This article examines differences in parental preference of potential in-laws across cultures. Results suggest that parents look for traits that will benefit themselves and their kin and that gender and subsistence type affects the traits that parents deem most important.

This article presents a theory of evolutionary development of incest regulation, namely that as societal complexity increases the incest taboo will become less extensive. The author presents empirical support for this theory, though the association is not supported among simply structured societies. The role of descent type is also discussed.

This book examines the difference between warless and warlike societies and attempts to determine the point at which a society becomes warlike. The author suggests that differences between warless and warlike societies are mostly organizational and hypothesizes that "unsegmented" societies, or societies that have a weaker sense of group identity and cohesion, will be more likely to be warless than "segmented" societies. Several tests are presented. Results generally support the hypothesis.

Using a new measure called "territorial fractionalization" to indicate the extent to which traditional societies are split across current states, the authors of this study propose that fragmentation of ethnic groups and ethnonationalism is key to understanding civil conflict. They find that higher measures of territorial fractionalization significantly predict a higher risk of civil conflict, and that greater increases in territorial fractionalization also predict greater risk of civil conflict. These results hold for a global sample of data from 1945 to 2017, as well as in European and African subsamples dating back to 1886.