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.

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.

Using phylogenetic comparative methods, the study explores the evolution of kinship terminologies within 176 societies in Austronesian, Bantu, and Uto-Aztecan language families. The authors consider 18 theories in the anthropological record that suggests that change in kinship terminologies is predicted by some social structures: marriage, residence, and descent. Only 19 of the 29 statistical hypotheses are supported, while none of the theories are supported in all three language families. This statistical irregularity means that the results are lineage-specific, instead of showing a universal driver of change in kinship terminology types.

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.

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

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 examines previous hypotheses concerning kinship terminologies, particularly the development of bifurcate merging. The roles of moieties, exogamy, unilinear kin groupings, unilinear descent, and preferential mating are considered.

This study seeks to evaluate the degree to which classical kinship models are able to capture variation in kinship terminology. Following a description of the classical typologies of kinship, the authors use statistical approaches and a new database, Kinbank, to assess the internal coherence of these typologies; they find that these typologies are not necessarily accurate predictors of kinship terms across cultures. In addition, this analysis showed that the use of one sort of kinship typology for one generation may only weakly indicate its use in an adjacent generation. The authors set out to try and identify new typologies using statistical modeling based on the single-generation kinship terms of 306 languages. They successfully identify 9 clusters of kinship terms for just one generation alone, indicating that kinship terminology is much more diverse than previously thought. They conclude kinship typology and variation in kinship terminology needs to be investigated more thoroughly.

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.