This article describes the rise of abstracted religious beliefs in larger, more anonymous societies and investigates whether societal density and differentiation have had similar effects on ritual. The authors suggest that the universalization of ritual is due in part to interrelated effects of population size, political hierarchy, economic division of labor, and monetary exchange, all factors that create anonymity in society.

This article offers an analysis of the rape of women cross-culturally, positing that rape is present under certain cultural circumstances. The author tests for correlations between rape and aspects of sexual repression, group violence, childrearing, and ideologies of male dominance. There are significant associations between male sexual violence and other types of violence, as well as between rape and ideologies of male dominance.

The authors of this exploratory study tested predictions from five different theoretical models for the evolution of ethnoscientific expertise. They claim support for three of the models. They then compared cultural variables and their five models to three different knowledge domains: conceptual (unable to be easily observed), motor (easily observable), and medicinal. Their results indicate that their cultural transmission model is associated with the motor knowledge domain and that their proprietary knowledge model is associated with the medicinal knowledge domain.

This article examines the relationship between religiousness, child socialization, and cultural complexity. Empirical analysis suggests that there is a positive association between cultural complexity and religiousness, especially ritual. Religiousness was also associated with schooling, one of the child-rearing variables examined. A theoretical discussion concerning religion and intellect is also included.

While it is widely accepted that there are a multitude of variables that contribute to a society’s level of democracy, the authors of this study argue that the prevalence of consanguinity is one that is often overlooked. Using a sample of 70 nations, they tested the relationship between consanguinity (defined as marriage and subsequent mating between second cousins or closer relatives) and level of democracy (defined by both the Polity IV scale and the EIU Index) and found a significant negative relationship. Similarly, when controlled for a host of different variables in multiple regression analysis, the significant relationship between consanguinity and level of democracy held true.

Focusing on 61 preindustrial societies that have information on fertility, the author asks what factors may explain variation in fertility, what devices are used to control fertility, and whether differences in fertility appear to be in line with the societies' environments.

In this article, the authors seek to understand dog-human coevolution by considering predictors of different aspects of dog-human relationships across cultures. In order to measure dog-human relationships, the researchers created three indexes: dogs' utility for humans (DUH), humans' utility for dogs (HUD), and the personhood of dogs (PD). Each of these indexes were tested against various pre-coded variables that were empirically and theoretically relevant to this subject.

This study examines the proposition that the cross-cultural patterning of sexual beliefs and behaviors is neither entirely regular nor entirely irregular. The author uses cluster analysis to observe the relationships between several variables associated with sexuality.

Cultures vary widely in regards to beauty standards for female body fat: while industrialized nations typically prefer thinness in women, ethnographic reports indicate that plumpness is valued in many small-scale societies. Here the authors evaluate several hypotheses that relate variation in female body fat preference to variation in socioecology such as food storage, climate, male social dominance, valuation and restriction of women's work, and female stress during adolescence.

Using a sample of 60 societies from eHRAF, this study explores the cross-cultural commonalities and differences in human-pet dynamics. The authors focus on understanding the range of functions of pets and the positive or negative treatment of pets. In addition, they test whether human investment in pets is a significant challenge of evolutionary theory. First, the results support that there are distinct functions of pets, challenging the common view of contemporary function of pets as emotional surrogates. Secondly, the data collected show an ambivalent treatment of pets across cultures, including small-scale societies. Finally, the research does not support the idea that human investment in pets sacrifices their reproductive success.