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Despite the variability of music worldwide, some types of human songs share basic acoustic characteristics. For example, dance songs tend to be loud and rhythmic, whereas lullabies tend to be quiet and melodious. Prior studies with western English-speaking participants have shown that this enables listeners to infer aspects of a singer's behavior, despite being unfamiliar with the singer's culture and language. Here, we test whether these intuitions are shared across a diversity of languages and human societies, with 5524 people from 49 industrialised countries comprising 28 languages, and 116 people in 3 small-scale societies with limited access to global media. Each made inferences about the behavioral contexts of 118 songs from 86 societies. Both groups reliably identified the behavioral functions of dance songs, lullabies, and healing songs. Linguistic and geographical proximity between listeners and singers was minimally predictive of accuracy, demonstrating a degree of cultural invariance in music perception.

Decades of research suggest that our political differences are best captured by two dimensions of political ideology: economic and social conservatism. The dual evolutionary framework of political ideology predicts that these dimensions should be related to variation in general preferences for cooperation and group conformity. Here, we show that, controlling for a host of demographic covariates, a general cooperative preference captured by a suite of incentivised economic games (the "cooperative phenotype") is indeed negatively correlated with two widely-used measures of economic conservatism - Social Dominance Orientation and Schwartz's altruistic vs. self-enhancement values. The cooperative phenotype also predicts political party support and economically progressive views on political issues like income redistribution, welfare, taxation, and environmentalism. By contrast, a second "norm-enforcing punishment" dimension of economic game behaviour, expected to be a proxy for social conservatism and group conformity, showed no reliable relationship with political ideology. These findings reveal how general social preferences that evolved to help us navigate the challenges of group living continue to shape our political differences even today. - Cooperative phenotype predicts economic conservatism, policy views, and political party support - Results - Discussion - Methods - Participants -- Power analysis -- Participants and sampling - Materials -- New Zealand Attitudes and Values Survey measures -- Battery of economic games - Procedure - Statistical analysis

Summary: Past population size can be estimated from modern genetic diversity using coalescent theory. Estimates of ancestral human population dynamics in Africa can tell us about the timing and nature of our first steps towards colonizing the globe. Here we combine Bayesian coalescent inference with a dataset of 224 complete human mtDNA sequences to establish effective population size through time for each of the four major African mtDNA haplogroups (L0-L3). We find evidence of three distinct demographic histories underlying the four haplogroups. Haplogroups L0 and L1 both show slow, steady exponential growth from 156-213 kya. In contrast, haplogroups L2 and L3 show evidence of substantial growth beginning 12-20 kya and 61-86 kya respectively. These later expansions may be associated with contemporaneous environmental and/or cultural changes. The timing of the L3 expansion - 8-12 ky prior to the emergence of the first non-African mtDNA lineages - together with high L3 diversity in east Africa, strongly supports the proposal that the human exodus from Africa and subsequent colonization of the globe was prefaced by a major expansion within Africa, perhaps driven by some form of cultural innovation.

Ethnographic, historical, archaeological and experimental work suggests the existence of two basic clusters of ritual dynamics or 'modes of religiosity' - a low-frequency, high-arousal cluster linked to the formation of small cohesive communities (imaginistic mode) and high-frequency, low-arousal cluster associated with larger, more centralized social morphology (doctrinal mode). Currently, however, we lack a large-scale survey of ritual variation on which to test such predictions. Here, we compile data on 645 religious rituals from 74 cultures around the globe, extracted from the Human Relations Area Files, revealing that the cultural morphospace of ritual form favours rituals that are indeed either low-frequency and highly dysphorically arouding or high-frequency with lower arousal and that these ritual dynamics are linked to group size and structure. These data also suggest that low dysphoric arousal, high-frequency rituals may have been tied to the advent of agriculture and subsequent emergence of the first large-scale civilizations.

To what extent can two 'Modes' be found amongst non-state armed groups (NSAGs)? The Modes theory hypotheses that NSAGs are organized into two distinct Modes, either the 'Imagistic' or the 'Doctrinal' Mode, with each Mode characterised by a particular organisational structure and type of resource extraction. Previous preliminary research on this had three limitations: 1) it used a sample of only five groups; 2) "Galton's problem", i.e. non-independence of groups was not taken into account, and 3) the theory of resource extraction was underdeveloped. The present research overcomes each of these limitations. First, can the patterns found in the 5-group case study be replicated with a larger sample? A dataset with 50 NSAGs was constructed, with variables that were derived from the theory and resembling those used for the 5-group case study. Analysis results showed that a few 'Doctrinal' variables were significantly correlated and 'Doctrinal' rituals had a frequency distribution as predicted. Yet, most correlations between all Modes variables were not significant, and analyses did not convincingly show that there were two distinct Modes. Second, to what extent does "Galton's problem" (autocorrelation) play a role amongst NSAGs regarding their Modes properties? Data on relations between armed groups and their geographical locations were added to the sample. Using Moran's I, it appeared that two to four Modes properties were significantly autocorrelated. With geographical region as covariate, analyses were redone. Results remained basically the same as without regional covariate. Third, what is the relationship between Modes and the type of Resource extraction? Resource types were operationalized and Resource type data were added to the sample of NSAGs. A theory on Risk, and a ROI (Return on Investment) and Risk index were developed. Regressions showed no change in ROI or Risk over time. Low ROI did not typically predict Doctrinal-related Modes properties, and high-ROI did not typically predict Imagistic-related Modes properties. The significance of relations between Modes properties and Resource types strongly depended on whether the analysis was a correlation or a regression. Overall, only a few relationships were significant and no consistent pattern emerged. Limitations of the present research, and suggestions for further research are discussed, as well as an overall assessment of the Modes theory.