News by Subject Social & Behavior

Bronze Age pastoralists in what is now southern Russia apparently covered shorter distances than previously thought. It is believed that the Indo-European languages may have originated from this region, and these findings raise new questions about how technical and agricultural innovations spread to Europe. An international research team, with the participation of the University of Basel, has published a paper on this topic.

The capacity for language is built upon our ability to understand combinations of words and the relationships between them, but the evolutionary history of this ability is little understood. Now, researchers from the University of Warwick have managed to date this capacity to at least 30-40 million years ago, the last common ancestor of monkeys, apes and humans.

The legend of Solomon and the birds associated with the Dome of the Rock was developed over time. Stories about the two birds demonstrate that Sufi traditions and the figure of Solomon were still very influential in shaping the appearance and conception of the Dome of the Rock.

McMaster University researchers who analyzed thousands of documents covering a 300-year span of plague outbreaks in London, England, have estimated that the disease spread four times faster in the 17th century than it had in the 14th century.

When anthropologists examined a broad, global sample of 30 pre-modern societies, they found that when 'good' governments -- ones that provided goods and services for their people and did not starkly concentrate wealth and power -- fell apart, they broke down more intensely than collapsing despotic regimes. And the researchers found a common thread in the collapse of good governments: leaders who undermined and broke from upholding core societal principles, morals, and ideals. It's... relevant.