This article tests hypotheses related to kinship terms, cousin marriage, and descent rules. Omaha, Crow, Eskimo, and Iroquois systems are each significantly associated with different kinship rules. Material from Northern Ghana is also considered.

This study investigates the relationship between Crow kinship terminology and avunculocality. Results indicate that if matrilateral cross-cousin marriage is associated with Crow kinship systems, then societies that are avunculocal are more likely have Crow systems.

Kinbank is a global database of 210,903 kinship terms derived from 1,229 spoken and signed languages. The authors created Kinbank as a tool to help explain recurring patterns across cultures through kinship terminology. They illustrate its usefulness by addressing two questions as an example: 1) Is there gender bias in the phonological structure of parent terms? and 2) Did bifurcate-merging terminology and cross-cousin marriage co-evolve in Bantu languages? Using a Bayesian phylogenetic approach, the authors find support for the first question, but none for the latter.

Researchers examined kinships terminology systems for explanations regarding specifically observed typology of kin terms for cousins cross-culturally. They explore two theories, the first relating to population size via bottleneck evolution, and the second relating to social practices that shape kinship systems. Using the Ethnographic Atlas within D-PLACE, 936 societies with kinship system information were studied. The findings did not suggest a relationship between increased community size and a decrease in kinship complexity, however the research does suggest a relationship between practices of marriage and descent and kinship complexity.

This study examines Crow and Omaha kinship terminologies, cross-cousin marriage practices, and descent rules. Several hypotheses relating these three variables are tested.

This book is a comprehensive analysis of many aspects of social structure including family, clan, community, kinship terminology, social organization, regulation of sex, incest taboos, and sexual choice.

After noticing that there are no cross-cultural phylogenetic studies of grandparent terminologies, the authors use the record from 134 Pama-Nyungan languages to explore the evolution of this kinship category and to evaluate the effects of social structures in this evolution. The authors suggest that there used to be four different terms for grandparents in the proto-Pama-Nyungan language family, which was supported by the data. The results show no evidence of co-evolution between these grandparent systems with neither community marriage organization nor post-marital residence. There is not a significant correlation between grandparent and cross-cousin terms; however, there is some evidence that grand-child terms are correlated to grandparent systems.

This paper presents a comprehensive list of kinship patterns for grandparents, grandchildren, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews, siblings, cross-cousins, and siblings-in-law. The author based these typologies on over 1000 kinship terminologies from around the world. The geographical distributions of kinship patterns are also included.

The author analyzes the association between joking behavior and four types of instutionalized potential marriage relationships. Results show a tendency for a joking relationship to occur in all cases.

This paper examines the distribution and diffusion of the seven patterns of sibling classifaction given by the author. The author then studies the association between descent and sibling terminology.