Music is a universal but diverse human trait. Using a dataset of 5,242 songs from 719 societies, this study identifies five major dimensions of musical diversity that show patterned geographic and historical structure. The authors then use these dimensions to ask whether they are related to genetic and linguistic relationships from 121 societies. Musical similarities are found to be only weakly related to language or genetic relationships, with stronger links only in certain regions such as Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa with further analysis showing largely vertical transmission across generations. Overall, global musical traditions appear largely independent from genetic and linguistic histories.

The authors examine musical diversity in India using cantometric data from 32 Indian societies with the goal of better understanding how music varies between and within cultures. They find very minor musical differences between language families, greater diversity between societies but within language families, and the most variation within societies.

Researchers investigated further into why and how humans speak so many languages across the globe, and why they are spread out unevenly. Using two different path analyses, a Stationary Path analysis and a GWPath, researchers tested the effect of eight different factors on language diversity. Out of the eight variables (river density, topographic complexity, ecoregion richness, temperature and precipitation constancy, climate change velocity, population density, and carrying capacity with group size limits), population density, carrying capacity with group size limit, and ecoregion richness had the strongest direct effects. Overall, the study revealed the role of multiple different mechanisms in shaping language richness patterns. The GWPath showed that not only does the most important predictor of language diversity vary over space, but predictors can also vary in the direction of their effects in different regions. They conclude that there is no universal predictor of language richness.

What causes people to trust or distrust others? Through a multi-level empirical analysis, the authors of this article find that societies with historical exposure to infectious diseases will tend to minimize contact with contaminated out-groups while strengthening in-group relationships to manage infections, thus developing a lower radius of trust.

Researchers used various hypotheses to determine if cross-country differences in trust and cooperation would predict prosocial COVID-19 responses and policies. Using individual surveys from 34,526 participants from 41 countries, there were no significant associations between trust and cooperation and prosocial behavior, motivation, regulation, or stringency of policies. While the researchers did find significant variation among cross-country individuals, these results were unable to predict country-level prosocial responses.

This book provides a summary of data available in the Ethnographic Atlas. Social, political, economic, and kinship variables are included, as well as information about religious beliefs, social restrictions, and games. Data is divided into world areas for the purposes of regional comparison.

The authors test the relationship between ethnolinguistic area and various environmental variables in a cross-cultural sample of hunter-gatherer, pastoral, and agricultural subsistence groups in order to evaluate various hypotheses surrounding the geographic and ecological origins of cultural diversity. They propose that societies which adopted agriculture at the beginning of the Holocene were less directly affected by climate which, combined with the effect of increasing political and cultural complexity, allowed coordination and homogenization of ethnolinguistic groups over a broader swathe of territory.

In asking whether or not there are meaningful universals in music, researchers compiled two catalogs – the Natural History of Song (NHS) Ethnography which contains ethnographic descriptions of song performances collected from eHRAF World Cultures, and the NHS Discography, which contains field recordings of performances of dance, healing, love, and lullaby. Using these two corpora, the study tests a variety of hypotheses about the universality and variability of both music behavior and music form. Specifically, whether there are meaningful universals in meaning and sound. The catalog of published sound recordings was analyzed by machine summaries, listener ratings, and manual transcriptions, which revealed that there were identifiable features of songs which could then predict their primary function cross-culturally. The results as a whole revealed that the existence of music is a cultural universal, and that the variation within music can be characterized by three factors assessing the formality, arousal, and religiosity of the song events. They also found that musical behavior varies more within societies than between them.

This study presents a log linear analysis of the relationship between plow agriculture, female crop tending, and polygyny. The hypothesis was not supported.

This article examines possible environmental predictors of ethnic diversity around the world. Results suggest that global ethnic diversity is associated with latitude, habitat diversity, pathogen stress, and climate.