Highlights•Religious beliefs and behavior across the world are closely linked to restricted
sexual attitudes and behavior.•Religions foster long-term, committed mating strategies by …

Over the last two decades, red ochre has played a pivotal role in discussions about the
cognitive and cultural evolution of early modern humans during the African Middle Stone …

Many aspects of religious rituals suggest they provide adaptive benefits. Studies across
societies consistently find that investments in ritual behaviour return high levels of …

Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to
report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this “gender gap” may depend on …

Sex differences in religiosity are cross-culturally common and robust, yet it is unclear why
sex differences in some cultures are larger than in others. Although women are more …

Objectives Human childrearing is cooperative, with women often able to achieve relatively
high fertility through help from many individuals. Previous work has documented …

Human social relationships, often grounded in kinship, are being fundamentally altered by
globalization as integration into geographically distant markets disrupts traditional kin based …

There has been increasing interest in the evolutionary study of religion, but perfunctory
fractionalization has limited our ability to explain how and why religion evolved, evaluate …

The centrality of religiosity in selecting long-term mates suggests atheism could be
undesirable for that context. Given recent findings suggesting several positive stereotypes …

This article considers the application of sexual selection theory to the study of religion by
discussing the basic concepts and theories in sexual selection and then outlines …