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As observed in recent centuries, the contemporary variety of kinship systems reflects millennia of human migration, cultural inheritance, adaptation, and diversification. This review describes key developments in prehistoric kinship, from matricentric hominin evolution to the Neolithic transition to agriculture and the heterogeneous resilience of matriliny. Starting with our hominin ancestors, kinship evolved among a cooperative breeding species to multilevel group structure among human hunter-gatherers, to substantial kinship changes brought on by the origins of intensified farming, to permanent settlements and unequal resource access. This review takes the approach that new forms of subsistence facilitated new equations of reproductive success, which changed cultural norms of kinship systems and heritable wealth. Subsequently, the formation of complex societies diminished kinship as the primary organizing principle of society. The article describes new methodologies and theoretical developments, along with critiques of bioarchaeological interpretations of prehistoric kinship.

From our hunter-gatherer days, we humans evolved to be excellent throwers, chewers, and long-distance runners. We are highly social, crave Paleolithic snacks, and display some gendered difference resulting from mate selection. But we now find ourselves binge-viewing, texting while driving, and playing Minecraft. Only the collective acceleration of cultural and technological evolution explains this development. The evolutionary psychology of individuals?the drive for?food and sex??explains some of our current habits, but our evolutionary success, Alex Bentley and Mike O?Brien explain, lies in our ability to learn cultural know-how and to teach it to the next generation. 00Bentley and O?Brien examine the broad and shallow model of cultural evolution seen today in the science of networks, prediction markets, and the explosion of digital information. They suggest that in the future, artificial intelligence could be put to work to solve the problem of information overload, learning to integrate concepts over the vast idea space of digitally stored information.

National responses to a pandemic require populations to comply through personal behaviors that occur in a cultural context. Here we show that aggregated cultural values of nations, derived from World Values Survey data, have been at least as important as top-down government actions in predicting the impact of COVID-19. At the population level, the cultural factor of cosmopolitanism, together with obesity, predict higher numbers of deaths in the first two months of COVID-19 on the scale of nations. At the state level, the complementary variables of government efficiency and public trust in institutions predict lower death numbers. The difference in effect between individual beliefs and behaviors, versus state-level actions, suggests that open cosmopolitan societies may face greater challenges in limiting a future pandemic or other event requiring a coordinated national response among the population. More generally, mass cultural values should be considered in crisis preparations. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43545-021-00080-2.

National responses to a pandemic require populations to comply through personal behaviors that occur in a cultural context. Here we show that aggregated cultural values of nations, derived from World Values Survey data, have been at least as important as top-down government actions in predicting the impact of COVID-19. At the population level, the cultural factor of cosmopolitanism, together with obesity, predict higher numbers of deaths in the first two months of COVID-19 on the scale of nations. At the state level, the complementary variables of government efficiency and public trust in institutions predict lower death numbers. The difference in effect between individual beliefs and behaviors, versus state-level actions, suggests that open cosmopolitan societies may face greater challenges in limiting a future pandemic or other event requiring a coordinated national response among the population. More generally, mass cultural values should be considered in crisis preparations.

In the centuries since the enlightenment, the world has seen an increase in socioeconomic development, measured as increased life expectancy, education, economic development and democracy. While the co-occurrence of these features among nations is well documented, little is known about their origins or co-evolution. Here, we compare this growth of prosperity in nations to the historical record of cultural values in the twentieth century, derived from global survey data. We find that two cultural factors, secular-rationality and cosmopolitanism, predict future increases in GDP per capita, democratization and secondary education enrollment. The converse is not true, however, which indicates that secular-rationality and cosmopolitanism are among the preconditions for socioeconomic development to emerge.

In the centuries since the enlightenment, the world has seen an increase in socioeconomic development, measured as increased life expectancy, education, economic development and democracy. While the co-occurrence of these features among nations is well documented, little is known about their origins or co-evolution. Here, we compare this growth of prosperity in nations to the historical record of cultural values in the twentieth century, derived from global survey data. We find that two cultural factors, secular-rationality and cosmopolitanism, predict future increases in GDP per capita, democratization and secondary education enrollment. The converse is not true, however, which indicates that secular-rationality and cosmopolitanism are among the preconditions for socioeconomic development to emerge.

The global pandemic of COVID-19 revealed the dynamic heterogeneity in how individuals respond to infection risks, government orders, and community-specific social norms. Here we demonstrate how both individual observation and social learning are likely to shape behavioral, and therefore epidemiological, dynamics over time. Efforts to delay and reduce infections can compromise their own success, especially when disease risk and social learning interact within sub-populations, as when people observe others who are (a) infected and/or (b) socially distancing to protect themselves from infection. Simulating socially-learning agents who observe effects of a contagious virus, our modelling results are consistent with with 2020 data on mask-wearing in the U.S. and also concur with general observations of cohort induced differences in reactions to public health recommendations. We show how shifting reliance on types of learning affect the course of an outbreak, and could therefore factor into policy-based interventions incorporating age-based cohort differences in response behavior.