Roman arena games essentially consisted of gladiator fights on life or death, cruel executions of delinquents, and chases with wild animals. Millions of humans and millions of animals were killed in the arenas during the Imperial period. This article shows that the mentioned elements of the games are found in most pre-modern societies around the globe since the oldest times, both in ancient civ...

It has often been noted that most of the major world religions espouse a version of the “golden rule.” In this paper we consider the cultural evolution of such a doctrine, where the responsibility to act altruistically towards others applies universally, not just to other members of the same society. Using a game-theoretical model, we find that societies over a critical size benefit from adopti...

This paper is a case study discussing the evolution of the Performing Arts in our contemporary societies. Globalised societies and economies influence human behaviours creating an enormous impact on the Arts. Considering Art as a communication apparatus that connects people, we examine the way in which performances progress and adjust to current social demands. Even though the globalisation pro...

The Corpus of Contemporary American English is the first large, genre-balanced corpus of any language, which has been designed and constructed from the ground up as a ‘monitor corpus’, and which can be used to accurately track and study recent changes in the language. The 400 million words corpus is evenly divided between spoken, fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, and academic journals. Mo...

V. Sommer and C. Ross (eds.), Primates of Gashaka, Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects 35, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7403-7_12, © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 Abstract Chimpanzees and bonobos, despite being closely related hominoid primates, differ in female gregariousness and dominance style. Violent male aggression is not atypical in chimpanzee societies and is vente...

In contemporary European societies, Muslims are often viewed through a binary frame of ‘moderate’ versus ‘radical’. This article aims to deconstruct the dichotomy ‘radical’, an...