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.

The present research investigates food sharing and labor sharing practices of 98 nonindustrial societies. The aims are to: 1) document the frequency and scope of sharing, and 2) test the theory that greater sharing is adaptive in societies subject to more resource stress (including natural hazards).

This exploratory study seeks to explain cassava production and processing in Africa by considering cultural, agronomic, and environmental data. After examining the descriptive results of the agricultural and social contexts of cassava use, the authors build upon Boserup's population density model (1965) to analyze their own hypothesized model of cassava's importance among the sampled societies.

In this article, the authors seek to determine cross-culturally valid predictors of dominant types of human subsistence around the world. They did this by formulating multiple models that incorporate different combinations of environmental, geographic, and social factors. These models were then used to test various hypotheses posed throughout the anthropological literature surrounding factors that determine dominant subsistence strategies.

This study follows the theoretical construct of general cultural tightness and looseness (TL). Tightness is thought to be adaptive when facing socioecological threat, such as resource stress, since it involves a greater amount of cooperation. The study asks: "Why do some societies have relatively standardized or uniform clothing and adornment, whereas others have considerable variability across individuals?", which is connected to the broader question of why some societies show more within-group variation. The authors use a sample of 80 non-industrial societies from SCSS, to explore the relationship between general cultural tightness and standardization or synchrony in dress. The results support that tighter societies have more uniformity in dress and that resource stress is a predictor of synchrony. However, it is not supported that egalitarian societies have more synchrony, and that tightness is positively predicted by resource stress.

Using a psychoanalytic-materialist approach, the author examines the possible effects of environmental unpredictability on the prevalence of unprovoked aggression by characters in folktales.

The second and third parts of this book classify the economic systems of foraging and agricultural societies in the SCCS based on correlations between their institutions of property an distribution. These economic types are then examined for relationships with other social, political, demographic, and environmental factors in order to draw tentative conclusions regarding the origins of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. The fourth part of the book uses cross-national data to examine similar associations in industrial/service economies, and is not included here.

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 pilot study, the authors investigate the relationships between both subsistence types and environmental conditions, and various coping mechanisms for drought in 35 societies in Africa. Using Canonical Correspondence Analysis (CCA), they find subsistence strategies to have a more significant correlation with the distribution of coping strategies for drought than environmental conditions.

"This article provides a set of codes that rate the starvation and famine experiences of societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. The codes are used to test several theoretical generalizations regarding the underlying causes of famine." Results indicate that seasonal starvation and direct entitlements are the strongest predictors of famine.