In his 1991 book Human Universals, American anthropologist Donald Brown listed “features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception”:

• fear of death
• tickling
• baby talk
• territoriality
• rites of passage
• hairstyles
• belief in supernatural
• dance
• containers
• jokes
• shame
• turn-taking
• weapons
• myths
• musical variation

The whole list is here. “We can look forward to the time when a great many cultural features are traced beyond the time and place of their invention to the specific features of human nature that gave rise to them,” he wrote. “The study of human universals will be an important component of that task.”

(Donald E. Brown, “Human Universals, Human Nature & Human Culture,” Daedalus 133:4 [Fall 2004], 47-54.)