Donald E. Brown (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_E._Brown) offered this thesis in 1991. His own summary of human universals is that they “comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception.”
We are all tiresomely familiar with the banal falsity that ‘everything is relative’. In the field of anthropology at least, Brown blows that one out the water. Of course there is a rich variety of human cultural practice and experience across the globe and across time, but something has to explain the similarities and continuities. Brown achieves that with conviction here.
160 pages in McGraw-Hill Higher Education Press
ISBN 978-0070082090