Russell D Gray

Biographic Data

ID856574
NAMERussell D Gray
GIVEN NAMESRussell D
FAMILY NAMEGray
SIGNATUREGRAY R D
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Auckland
ORCID0000-0002-9858-0191
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS28
TOTAL CITATIONS34
AUTHOR COUNT28
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1994
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX4

  • Exploring Amazonian Cognitive Diversity at Chana Research Station

    Open AccessMariana Poblete, Caroline Andrews et al.ARTICLETopics in Cognitive Science2026

    The Chana Research Station for Language Sciences and Interculturality is a scientific initiative dedicated to exploring the linguistic, cultural, and cognitive diversity of the Peruvian Amazon. Building on long‐standing local partnerships and collaborations, Chana facilitates research on cognition that extends beyond populations from industrialized democracies, traditionally overrepresented in behavioral sciences. Other populations—such as those …

  • Did alcohol facilitate the evolution of complex societies

    Open AccessVáclav Hrnčíř, Angela M Chira et al.ARTICLEHumanities and Social Sciences…2025

    The size and complexity of human societies increased dramatically over the Holocene. Researchers have proposed a variety of potential drivers of this major transition, including our predilection for alcoholic beverages. This “drunk” hypothesis argues that drinking alcohol facilitated the rise of complex societies because it promotes social bonding, increases cooperation, and enhances human creativity. At the political level, alcohol-driven feasti…

  • Different models, different assumptions, different findings

    Open AccessOlena Shcherbakova, Volker Gast et al.ARTICLELinguistic Typology2025

    Article Different models, different assumptions, different findings: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo was published on July 28, 2025 in the journal Linguistic Typology (volume 0, issue 0)

  • Climate, climate change and the global diversity of human houses

    Open AccessRobert R Dunn, Kathryn R Kirby et al.ARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2024References: 7

    Globally, human house types are diverse, varying in shape, size, roof type, building materials, arrangement, decoration and many other features. Here we offer the first rigorous, global evaluation of the factors that influence the construction of traditional (vernacular) houses. We apply macroecological approaches to analyse data describing house features from 1900 to 1950 across 1000 societies. Geographic, social and linguistic descriptors for e…

  • Geography is not destiny

    Open AccessAngela M Chira, Russell D Gray et al.ARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2024References: 6

    Jared Diamond suggested that the unique East–West orientation of Eurasia facilitated the spread of cultural innovations and gave it substantial political, technological and military advantages over other continental regions. This controversial hypothesis assumes that innovations can spread more easily across similar habitats, and that environments tend to be more homogeneous at similar latitudes. The resulting prediction is that Eurasia is home t…

  • A quantitative global test of the complexity trade-off hypothesis

    Open AccessOlena Shcherbakova, Volker Gast et al.ARTICLELinguistics Vanguard2023

    Nouns and verbs are known to differ in the types of grammatical information they encode. What is less well known is the relationship between verbal and nominal coding within and across languages. The equi-complexity hypothesis holds that all languages are equally complex overall, which entails trade-offs between coding in different domains. From a diachronic point of view, this hypothesis implies that the loss and gain of coding in different doma…

  • A recent northern origin for the Uto-Aztecan family

    Simon J Greenhill, Hannah J Haynie et al.ARTICLELanguage2023

  • A recent northern origin for the Uto-Aztecan family

    Simon J Greenhill, Simon Greenhill et al.ARTICLELanguage2023Cited by: 3References: 24

    The Uto-Aztecan language family is one of the largest language families in the Americas. However, there has been considerable debate about its origin and how it spread. Here we use Bayesian phylogenetic methods to analyze lexical data from thirty-four Uto-Aztecan varieties and two Kiowa-Tanoan languages. We infer the age of Proto-Uto-Aztecan to be around 4,100 years (3,258-5,025 years) and identify the most likely homeland to be near what is now …

  • Grambank reveals the importance of genealogical constraints on linguistic diversity and highlights the impact of language loss

    Hedvig Skirgård, Hannah J Haynie et al.PREPRINT2022

    While global patterns of human genetic diversity are increasingly well characterized, the diversity of human languages remains less systematically described. Here we outline the Grambank database. With over 400,000 data points and 2,400 languages, Grambank is the largest comparative grammatical database available. The comprehensiveness of Grambank allows us to quantify the relative effects of genealogical inheritance and geographic proximity on t…

  • Coevolution of religious and political authority in Austronesian societies

    Open AccessOliver Sheehan, Joseph Watts et al.ARTICLENature Human Behaviour2022References: 36

    Authority, an institutionalized form of social power, is one of the defining features of the large-scale societies that evolved during the Holocene. Religious and political authority have deep histories in human societies and are clearly interdependent, but the nature of their relationship and its evolution over time is contested. We purpose-built an ethnographic dataset of 97 Austronesian societies and used phylogenetic methods to address two lo…

  • The awe-prosociality relationship

    Anastasia Ejova, Jan Krátký et al.ARTICLEReligion Brain & Behavior2021

    People in a state of awe have been found to perceive their needs as small while also expressing intentions to act in a prosocial way, benefitting others at personal cost. However, these findings come largely out of the USA and have focused on intended rather than real prosocial behavior. We propose a contextual model of the awe-prosociality relationship predicated on the constructed theory of emotion, according to which emotion categories and cos…

  • Pathways to social inequality

    Open AccessHannah J Haynie, Patrick H Kavanagh et al.ARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2021Cited by: 6References: 15

  • Cultural transmission and ecological opportunity jointly shaped global patterns of reliance on agriculture

    Open AccessBruno Vilela, Trevor S Fristoe et al.ARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2020Cited by: 1References: 11

  • Coding culture

    Open AccessEdward Slingerland, Quentin Atkinson et al.ARTICLEEvolutionary Human Sciences2020Cited by: 5References: 15

  • Response to “Ancient DNA and its contribution to understanding the human history of the Pacific Islands” (Bedford et al . 2018)

    Open AccessCosimo Posth, Kathrin Nägele et al.ARTICLEArchaeology in Oceania/Archæology…2019Cited by: 2References: 16

    C.P., K.N., H.C., R.G, J.K. and A.P. are funded by the Max Planck Society. A.P. is also funded by European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant “Waves” (ERC 758967

  • Post-marital residence patterns show lineage-specific evolution

    Open AccessJiří C Moravec, Quentin Atkinson et al.ARTICLEEvolution and Human Behavior2018

    Where a newly-married couple lives, termed post-marital residence, varies cross-culturally and changes over time. While many factors have been proposed as drivers of this change, among them general features of human societies like warfare, migration and gendered division of subsistence labour, little is known about whether changes in residence patterns exhibit global regularities. Here, we study ethnographic observations of post-marital residence…

  • Christianity spread faster in small, politically structured societies

    Open AccessJoseph Watts, Oliver Sheehan et al.ARTICLENature Human Behaviour2018Cited by: 4References: 41

  • Hindcasting global population densities reveals forces enabling the origin of agriculture

    Open AccessPatrick H Kavanagh, Bruno Vilela et al.ARTICLENature Human Behaviour2018Cited by: 13References: 38

  • Can honest signaling theory clarify religion’s role in the evolution of social inequality

    Joseph A Bulbulia, Gertrude Fraser et al.ARTICLEReligion Brain & Behavior2017

    Vivid coloration, pungent odors, strident alarms, and crippling stings have co-evolved in many lineages as mechanisms that conspicuously identify menacing creatures. Biologists call this mode of communication aposematic signaling, from the Greek apo “away” and sema “sign.” Despite the prevalence of aposematic signaling across a broad range of biological taxa, its scope and role in human cultural evolution remains unclear. Evidence from a large da…

  • Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies

    Open AccessJoseph Watts, Oliver Sheehan et al.ARTICLENature2016

  • The sequential evolution of land tenure norms

    Open AccessGeoff Kushnick, Russell D Gray et al.ARTICLEEvolution and Human Behavior2014

  • The ecology of religious beliefs

    Open AccessCarlos A Botero, BETH GARDNER et al.ARTICLEProceedings of the National…2014

    Significance Here we show that the spatial prevalence of human societies that believe in moralizing high gods can be predicted with a high level of accuracy (91%) from historical, social, and ecological data. Using high-resolution datasets, we systematically estimate the relative effects of resource abundance, ecological risk, cultural diffusion, shared ancestry, and political complexity on the global distribution of beliefs in moralizing high go…

  • Cultural Evolution of Language

    Dan Dediu, Michael Cysouw et al.CHAPTERCultural Evolution2013

    This chapter argues that an evolutionary cultural approach to language not only has already proven fruitful, but it probably holds the key to understand many puzzling aspects of language, its change and origins.The chapter begins by highlighting several still common misconceptions about language that might seem to call into question a cultural evolutionary approach.It explores the antiquity of language and sketches a general evolutionary approach…

  • Mapping the Origins and Expansion of the Indo-European Language Family

    Open AccessRemco Bouckaert, Philippe Lemey et al.ARTICLEScience2012

    A Family of Languages English is part of the large Indo-European language family, which includes Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian languages. The origin of this family is hotly debated: one hypothesis places the origin north of the Caspian Sea in the Pontic steppes, from where it was disseminated by Kurgan semi-nomadic pastoralists; a second suggests that Anatolia, in modern-day Turkey, is the source, and the language radia…

  • How old is the Indo-European language family?

    Quentin Atkinson, Russell D Gray