This article examines meat avoidance during pregnancy as an evolutionary adaptation. Data suggests that during pregnancy, meat avoidance is significantly more common cross-culturally than other types of food avoidance. The timing of meat avoidance, the presence of meat-borne pathogens, and sensory and ingestive changes in early pregnancy are also discussed.

This study retests the data presented by Sillitoe (1977) in his study of the relationship between likelihood of warfare and population density in New Guinea. Contrary to Sillitoe, the author finds a strong and significant association between the two variables. The author also finds a significant relationship between the severity of food shortages and the frequency of warfare cross-culturally.

The authors of this study explore the relationship between climate variability and beliefs that high gods are associated with the weather. As predicted, they find significant correlations between these beliefs and dry climates. They then evaluate how these findings contribute to their previous understanding of resource stress and its association to beliefs in high gods.

This study seeks to investigate the association between gender role attitudes and cultural values of embeddedness, hierarchy, and egalitarianism. After establishing approximate measurement equivalence, the authors ran correlations on data from 36 countries included in the latest edition of the International Social Survey Programme carried out in 2012. Results suggest that embeddedness and hierarchy are positively related to traditional gender role attitudes and egalitarianism is negatively related to traditional gender role attitudes.

This study reviews the dietary habits of South and East Asia, Oceania, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Ethnographic descriptions and raw data are presented. The author concludes with several observed patterns: humans are carnivorous and become vegetarian by force of circumstance; taboos are more commonly used on meat than on plants; eating patterns conform to economic base; people tend to extract a fairly high percentage of available resources from their environment.

Geophagy during pregnancy has been proposed to fulfill a number of adaptive functions, including relieving gastrointestinal distress, detoxification of the secondary compounds found in plant foods, and providing a supplementary source of minerals such as calcium. Using a sample of 60 African populations, the authors investigate geophagy during pregnancy in a cross-cultural perspective, emphasizing variation between dairying and non-dairying populations.

Authors suggest that in a majority of studied societies, kin of the deceased tend to engage ritually in risky prolonged and intimate preparation behaviors with corpses. This occurs namely in visual exposure and tactile interaction. Authors hypothesize that this extended contact not only allows true confirmation of death (through exposure to many cues), but also facilitates acceleration of a grieving process that returns the bereaved to a normal state of social functioning.

The present study examines 60 societies from the Probability Sample Files to see if there is a cross-cultural moral valence of seven cooperative behaviors. These behaviors include: being brave, deferring to superiors, dividing disputed resources, helping kin, helping your group, reciprocating, and respecting prior possessions. The results offer support for the theory of morality-as-cooperation that these seven behaviors tend to be widely held morals across cultures.

The author tests various hypotheses regarding cross-cultural occurrence of geophagy, the eating of earth. Nearly 500 years of references to geophagy were compiled into the Database on Human Geophagy, which was then used to examine biological justifications for this little-understood behavior.

In this article, the authors seek to understand the connection between male resource-holding potential and male mating success. This connection has been suggested by behavioral ecologists as a way of explaining differing rates of polygyny across cultures. The authors investigate this relationship by testing the relationship between rates of polygyny and male control of local subsistence sites among North American societies during the period of contact. They find a positive relationship between these two variables for both terrestrial and aquatic game, but not for gathered plants. This suggests support for the theory.