This study examines instances of group fission cross-culturally. Results suggest that internal political conflict and resource scarcity are the two most common causes of group fission. Results also suggest that group fission tends to occur along kin lines.

The authors predict that fitness outcomes will be negatively associated with spousal relatedness among foragers but positively associated among non-foragers, due to the greater social benefits of intensive kinship systems among non-foragers. Support is found for this hypothesis; however, an interaction effect is discovered with inbreeding, which appears to account for the variability in these relationships independent of subsistence activity. The authors qualify this support in order to explain why the incidence of cousin-marriage in non-foraging societies is not higher.

This study attempts to reconstruct ancestral marriage practices using hunter-gathers' phylogenies based on mitochondrial DNA sequences. Data suggest that arranged marriages and brideprice/bridewealth likely go back at least to the first modern human migrations out of Africa and that early ancestral human societies probably had low levels of polygyny.

This article examines whether intergenerational wealth transmission perpetuates inequality among hunter-gatherers. The authors consider three types of wealth: embodied, material, and relational. Empirical analysis of wealth transmission in five cultures suggests that, in many cases, a parent’s wealth is associated with a child’s life chances. Gini coefficients suggest that hunter-gatherer cultures have low to moderate wealth inequality overall: very low by current world standards but not non-existent.

This article examines marital residence and sibling coresidence among horticulturalists in the South American lowlands. The authors reject a hypothesis that patrilocality is the defining trait of Amazonian tropical forest culture. Results on horticulturalists are compared with findings on hunter-gatherers: horticulturalists tend to be more uxorilocal. Empirical analysis also suggests that women tend to live with more kin later in life, and in large villages headmen live with more kin than nonheadmen.

This article examines the relationship between hunter-gatherer mobility and resource distribution. Several environmental and mobility variables are defined. Data suggest that the extent to which a group of hunter-gatherers emphasizes residential or logistic mobility is closely related to the structure of resources in their environment.

This article seeks to reevaluate the widespread assumption that hunter-gatherers lack the longevity that people in the modern, industrialized world enjoy. Through modeling life expectancy, mortality, and other demographic trends among extant hunter-gatherer, gatherer-horticulturalists, and horticulturalists societies they are able to challenge this belief. The authors conclude that longevity is a "novel feature of Homo sapiens" and that seven decades seems to be the natural lifespan of a human.

This study explores predictors of variation in two dimensions of marital residence patterns among hunter-gatherers: 1) the tendency toward patrilocality versus matrilocality and 2) the tendency toward unilocality versus bilocality.

In this book, the author conducts a cross-cultural analysis of the complexities of different types of food-getting technology. This book centers around the "technounit" which is a term the author coined meaning a discrete component of a tool, weapon, or other technology. The research in this book is chiefly concerned with measuring technological complexity by counting these technounits. Qualitative analyses and quantitative measurements are conducted for different types of food getting technology including tools, weapons, and facilities, both tended and untended. Additionally, this type of analysis is conducted for different types of exploitative networks in various climates. The author concludes that each type of technology (tools to weapons to facilities) is more complex than the last. Other findings of this analysis are as follows: hunters tend to have more complex technology than farmers, cultures in the desert and tropical climates have less complex technology than those in temperate and arctic climates, and intensive hunters tend to have more complex technology than intensive gatherers. The author also concludes with theoretical notes on human technological production and on the possibilities of this type of cross-cultural research.

This study tests four hypotheses that propose potential environmental and social predictors of toolkit size and complexity among hunter-gatherers. Hypotheses predicting relationships between population size, residential mobility, type of food resources and toolkit structure are not supported. Risk of resource failure is the only variable that is significantly associated with toolkit structure.