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From the foods we eat and the houses we construct, to our religious practices and political organization, to who we can marry and the types of games we teach our children, the diversity of cultural practices in the world is astounding. Yet, our ability to visualize and understand this diversity is limited by the ways it has been documented and shared: on a culture-by-culture basis, in locally-told stories or difficult-to-access repositories. In this paper we introduce D-PLACE, the Database of Places, Language, Culture, and Environment. This expandable and open-access database (accessible at ) brings together a dispersed corpus of information on the geography, language, culture, and environment of over 1400 human societies. We aim to enable researchers to investigate the extent to which patterns in cultural diversity are shaped by different forces, including shared history, demographics, migration/diffusion, cultural innovations, and environmental and ecological conditions. We detail how D-PLACE helps to overcome four common barriers to understanding these forces: i) location of relevant cultural data, (ii) linking data from distinct sources using diverse ethnonyms, (iii) variable time and place foci for data, and (iv) spatial and historical dependencies among cultural groups that present challenges for analysis. D-PLACE facilitates the visualisation of relationships among cultural groups and between people and their environments, with results downloadable as tables, on a map, or on a linguistic tree. We also describe how D-PLACE can be used for exploratory, predictive, and evolutionary analyses of cultural diversity by a range of users, from members of the worldwide public interested in contrasting their own cultural practices with those of other societies, to researchers using large-scale computational phylogenetic analyses to study cultural evolution. In summary, we hope that D-PLACE will enable new lines of investigation into the major drivers of cultural change and global patterns of cultural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue “Evolutionary Approaches to Cross-Cultural Anthropology” brings together scholars from the fields of behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and cultural evolution whose cross-cultural work draws on evolutionary theory and methods. The papers here are a subset of those presented at a symposium we organized for the 2011 meeting of the Society for Cross-Cultural Research held in Charleston, South Carolina. Collectively, our authors show how an engagement with cultural variation has enriched evolutionary anthropology, and these papers showcase how cross-cultural research can benefit from the theoretical and methodological contributions of an evolutionary approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]