News by Subject Social & Behavior

Big data analyses by an international research team, including a member of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, suggest that moralizing gods are rather the product than the drivers of social complexity. The results are published in the current issue of the journal Nature.

Guinness World Records have independently certified an astrolabe excavated from the wreck site of a Portuguese Armada Ship that was part of Vasco da Gama's second voyage to India in 1502-1503 as the oldest in the world, and have separately certified a ship's bell (dated 1498) recovered from the same wreck site also as the oldest in the world.

The genetic legacy of European hunter-gatherers who lived thousands of years ago is more complex than had been thought, according to new genomic evidence reported in Current Biology on March 14. The new findings point to more diversity and mixture amongst hunter-gatherers, especially in the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe now recognized as Portugal and Spain, who had endured the Last Glacial Maximum (18,000-24,000 years ago) in southern refugia.

A mutli-isotope analysis of pigs remains found around henge complexes near Stonehenge has revealed the large extent and scale of movements of human communities in Britain during the Late Neolithic. The findings 'demonstrate a level of interaction and social complexity not previously appreciated,' the authors say, and provide insight into more than a century

For the past year and a half, Bright Line Watch, a non-partisan group of political scientists, has been surveying the American public and exports to gauge the state of the nation's democracy. Possibly most worrisome, they find that the president's supporters and detractors are increasingly drawing conclusions about the health of the US democracy that are 'not merely disconnected, but reflect an increasingly different understanding of our political reality itself.'

By re-dating giant ground sloth remains found in the Argentinian Pampas region using more advanced technology, scientists say they have provided evidence that humans hunted and butchered this animal near a swamp during the end of the Pleistocene.