Nature Search

State formation across cultures and the role of grain, intensive agriculture, taxation and writing

Opie and Atkinson conduct a global phylogenetic analysis of 868 cultures and find evidence indicating that cereal grain cultivation, not agricultural surplus, drove state formation. Their findings also link taxation and writing to state emergence.

Christopher Opie
Quentin D. Atkinson
ResearchOpen Access25 Nov 2025
Nature Human Behaviour

Volume: 10, P: 156-163
Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses

Despite their great diversity, human languages are shaped by recurring grammatical universals. Verkerk et al. show that about one-third of the proposed universals hold cross-linguistically through analyses of the Grambank database.

Annemarie Verkerk
Olena Shcherbakova
Russell D. Gray
ResearchOpen Access17 Nov 2025
Nature Human Behaviour

Volume: 10, P: 126-136
The cultural foundations of modern democracies

Scholars have long disagreed about how best to achieve stable national democracy. Ruck et al. show that democratization follows from an intergenerational build-up of democratic cultural values, without which democracy is liable to fail.

Damian J. Ruck
Luke J. Matthews
R. Alexander Bentley
Research02 Dec 2019
Nature Human Behaviour

Volume: 4, P: 265-269
Individual differences in motives for costly punishment

Using behavioural economic games, this study finds that people vary in their motives for punishment. Punishment motives are predicted by personality, social preferences, political and religious views, and self-reported strategies.

Scott Claessens
Quentin D. Atkinson
Nichola J. Raihani
ResearchOpen Access12 Jan 2026
Communications Psychology

Volume: 4, P: 1-13
Valence-dependent mutation in lexical evolution

This research finds that negative adjectives evolve faster over history than positive adjectives, with limited evidence for other parts of speech. Individual people are also more likely to replace negative words than positive words.

Joshua Conrad Jackson
Kristen Lindquist
Joseph Watts
Research28 Nov 2022
Nature Human Behaviour

Volume: 7, P: 190-199
Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality

Using economic games, the authors examine the role of religion in the persistence of human cooperation; individuals who claim that their gods are moralizing, punitive and knowledgeable about human affairs are more likely to play fairly towards geographically distant co-religionists.

Benjamin Grant Purzycki
Coren Apicella
Joseph Henrich
Research10 Feb 2016
Nature

Volume: 530, P: 327-330
Cross-national analyses require additional controls to account for the non-independence of nations

Nations are connected in many ways, yet cross-national analyses often assume they are independent. Here, the authors show that previous studies may not have sufficiently accounted for this non-independence of nations.

Scott Claessens
Thanos Kyritsis
Quentin D. Atkinson
ResearchOpen Access18 Sept 2023
Nature Communications

Volume: 14, P: 1-13
Treatment of missing data determined conclusions regarding moralizing gods

Bret Beheim
Quentin D. Atkinson
Aiyana K. Willard
Research07 Jul 2021
Nature

Volume: 595, P: E29-E34
Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories

Human groups preserve cultural history in songs passed between generations. Here the authors show that musical histories are largely independent of the history preserved in genes and languages.

Sam Passmore
Anna L. C. Wood
Patrick E. Savage
ResearchOpen Access10 May 2024
Nature Communications

Volume: 15, P: 1-12
Coevolution of religious and political authority in Austronesian societies

Phylogenetic methods applied to ethnographic data show that systems of religious and political authority have worked synergistically over millennia of Austronesian cultural evolution, without showing a clear tendency to become more or less distinct.

Oliver Sheehan
Joseph Watts
Quentin D. Atkinson
ResearchOpen Access10 Nov 2022
Nature Human Behaviour

Volume: 7, P: 38-45
Frequency of word-use predicts rates of lexical evolution throughout Indo-European history

Statistical modelling techniques and concepts from biology are applied to linguistic data to show a general and law-like relationship between the frequency with which meanings are used in everyday language and their rate of evolution throughout Indo-European history: the more a word is used, the less likely it is to change over time. The findings demonstrate a fundamental aspect of language evolution that is predicted to apply to all languages.

Mark Pagel
Quentin D. Atkinson
Andrew Meade
Research11 Oct 2007
Nature

Volume: 449, P: 717-720
Language-tree divergence times support the Anatolian theory of Indo-European origin

Russell D. Gray
Quentin D. Atkinson
Research27 Nov 2003
Nature

Volume: 426, P: 435-439
Acoustic regularities in infant-directed speech and song across cultures

Across 21 societies, people alter their speech and song when interacting with infants. These infant-directed vocalizations are recognized by listeners. This suggests that forms of human vocalizations may be shaped by their functions.

Courtney B. Hilton
Cody J. Moser
Samuel A. Mehr
Research18 Jul 2022
Nature Human Behaviour

Volume: 6, P: 1545-1556
The origin and expansion of Pama–Nyungan languages across Australia

A Bayesian phylogeographic analysis of vocabulary from 306 Pama–Nyungan languages suggests that the language family rose to dominance across Australia in a process of rapid replacement following an origin in the Gulf Plains region during the mid-Holocene.

Remco R. Bouckaert
Claire Bowern
Quentin D. Atkinson
Research12 Mar 2018
Nature Ecology & Evolution

Volume: 2, P: 741-749
Cross-cultural dataset for the evolution of religion and morality project

Benjamin Grant Purzycki
Coren Apicella
Joseph Henrich
ResearchOpen Access08 Nov 2016
Scientific Data

Volume: 3, P: 1-12
The dual evolutionary foundations of political ideology

Claessens et al. propose that the two dimensions of political ideology identified by previous research correspond to two key shifts in the evolution of human group living: a shift towards cooperation and a shift towards group conformity.

Scott Claessens
Kyle Fischer
Quentin D. Atkinson
Reviews30 Mar 2020
Nature Human Behaviour

Volume: 4, P: 336-345
Christianity spread faster in small, politically structured societies

Theories about the spread of Christianity are tested using comparative cross-cultural methods and historical data on 70 Austronesian cultures. Conversion was fastest in small and politically organized societies, but not impacted by social inequality.

Joseph Watts
Oliver Sheehan
Quentin D. Atkinson
Research23 Jul 2018
Nature Human Behaviour

Volume: 2, P: 559-564
An analytical survey of zinc white historical and modern artists’ materials

Nicoletta Palladino
Mathilde Occelli
Johanna Salvant
ResearchOpen Access07 Feb 2024
Heritage Science

Volume: 12, P: 1-29
Stepwise evolution of stable sociality in primates

Susanne Shultz
Christopher Opie
Quentin D. Atkinson
Research09 Nov 2011
Nature

Volume: 479, P: 219-222
Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies

Phylogenetic methods were applied to a cross-cultural database of traditional Austronesian societies to test the link between ritual human sacrifice and the origins of social hierarchy—the presence of sacrifice in a society stabilized social stratification and promoted inherited class systems.

Joseph Watts
Oliver Sheehan
Russell D. Gray
Research04 Apr 2016
Nature

Volume: 532, P: 228-231
Cooperative and conformist behavioural preferences predict the dual dimensions of political ideology

Scott Claessens
Chris G. Sibley
Quentin D. Atkinson
ResearchOpen Access25 Mar 2023
Scientific Reports

Volume: 13, P: 1-16
Cooperative phenotype predicts climate change belief and pro-environmental behaviour

Scott Claessens
Daniel Kelly
Quentin D. Atkinson
ResearchOpen Access26 Jul 2022
Scientific Reports

Volume: 12, P: 1-10
Straight motion of half-integer topological defects in thin Fe-N magnetic films with stripe domains

S. Fin
R. Silvani
D. Bisero
ResearchOpen Access19 Jun 2018
Scientific Reports

Volume: 8, P: 1-13

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