Mining operations in the Enmynveem valley, northeastern Siberia, exposed a well-preserved right hind leg of Mammuthus primigenius (woolly mammoth), dated to ca. 37,500 cal yr BP. The leg had a fracture that crosscut the midsections of the tibia and fibula. Additional skeletal and soft tissue remains, including two mummified adults (Berezovka, ca. 47,200 cal yr BP; Bolshoi Lyakhovsky, ca. 37,000 cal yr BP), document the presence of mammoths in interior mountain valleys and across both northern and southern coasts of far northeastern Siberia during Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 3. A mosaic of herb-dominated tundra communities characterized the vegetation of the Enmynveem site during late to middle MIS 3 and MIS 2 (ca. 37,000–17,000 cal yr BP). Shrubs were limited to Salix during the late Pleistocene, whereas Betula also may have been present in sheltered sites during MIS 3. Herb communities remained dominant during the late Pleistocene–Early Holocene transition, although shrub Betula increased during this interval. By ca. 10,200 cal yr BP, the vegetation was Betula–Alnus shrub tundra. Larix and Pinus pumila were established in the valley by ca. 8700 cal yr BP and ca. 5700 cal yr BP, respectively.

Emotions shape strategic conflict dynamics. However, the precise way in which strategic and emotional concerns interact to affect international cooperation and contention are not well understood. We propose a model of intergroup conflict under incomplete information in which agents are sensitive to psychological motivations in the form of anger. Agents become angry in response to worse-than-expected outcomes due to actions of other players. Aggression may be motivated by anger or by beliefs about preferences of members of the other group. Increasing one group’s sensitivity to anger makes that group more aggressive but reduces learning about preferences, which makes the other group less aggressive in response to bad outcomes. Thus, anger has competing effects on the likelihood of conflict. The results have important implications for understanding the complex role of anger in international relations and, more generally, the interplay between psychological and material aims in both fomenting and ameliorating conflict.

Catholic education faces a number of serious challenges including cultural and political disrespect for, and hostility towards religion in general and Catholicism in particular, and lack of knowledge of, and commitment to, Catholic beliefs and values among Catholic educational administrators, school managers, teachers, and other staff, as well as the diminishing percentage of even nominally Catholic staff. I set these matters within the context of broader challenges surrounding Catholic education, deriving from three cultural movements: the reformation, the emergence of liberalism, and the scientific revolution, which undermined the synthesis of scripture, theology, and speculative and practical philosophy achieved in the high middle-ages. I propose in response a creative critique showing that what is of authentic value in modernity can be accommodated within the traditional synthesis. I also connect that tradition with strands of eastern philosophy suggesting that the movement of people, ideas, and traditions from Eastern cultures into historically Western societies provides an opportunity for further synthesis of a wisdom-based approach to education.

In the early 1970s, the plight of a charismatic Black American communist and philosophy professor Angela Davis, put on trial in the United States for her alleged involvement in a courtroom shootout in California, galvanized international public opinion. A massive publicity campaign in support of Angela Davis resonated across the globe and drew in millions of volunteers and sympathizers. The nations of the communist bloc, led by the Soviet Union, were particularly active in rallying their citizens in defense of a jailed American radical. In 1970–1972, Davis became a household name throughout the Soviet Union (but also in East Germany, Cuba, Poland, and other socialist nations). The “Free Angela Davis” campaign was unprecedented in scope and left a lasting mark on the collective memory of the citizens of the Soviet Union and its socialist satellites. Such was the impact of this propaganda juggernaut that decades later the image of Angela Davis remained current as a pop-cultural phenomenon across the former Soviet spaces and a symbol of unrealized and often conflicting aspirations towards freedom.

The article analyses the solidarity campaigns organized by the Czechoslovak Committee for Solidarity with African and Asian Peoples between the 1960s and 1980s. It situates the Czechoslovak solidarity towards African countries in the wider framework of the solidarity politics of the Eastern bloc and points out differences as well as similarities. Although the Czechoslovak Solidarity Committee was one of the first such committees to be founded in Eastern Europe, in the 1960s its official as well as public commitment to internationalist principles was modest compared with those of solidarity movements elsewhere in the bloc. However, the solidarity campaigns with African liberation movements intensified in the early 1970s. The campaigns in this period were marked by strong national symbolism, which drew on historical parallels between the African and Czechoslovak struggles for independence. The everyday internationalism in this case filled the public space with images of shared suffering, inferiority, and occupation, through which Czechoslovak citizens made sense of their historical role in the world. The article argues that this “nationalization” of official solidarity campaigns helped to embed the victimization narratives that survived the Velvet Revolution and that, in the 1990s, became a basis for new Czech and Slovak political identification.

This article examines the interplay between traditional leaders, democratically elected leaders and succession in Makapanstad Village, North West Province, South Africa. The article stems from community-based participatory action research conducted in Makapanstad in 2018. The article uses research data, in the form of community dialogue, together with desktop literature on the same subject. The article analyses the significance and role of traditional leadership in a democratic South Africa. It considers traditional leadership and democratically elected leadership in conjunction with succession and the demarcation of roles and responsibilities. The article analyses participants’ views to explore the form of leadership preferred by the residents of Makapanstad. It argues that, despite the recognition of traditional leadership in South Africa's Constitution, the roles and responsibilities of traditional leaders in local and provincial arms of government are limited, in contrast to those of democratically elected leaders.

This essay explores how mid-twentieth-century mathematicians at New York University envisioned their discipline, cultural identities and social roles, and how these self-constructed identities materialized in the planning of their new academic building, Warren Weaver Hall. These mathematicians considered their research to be a ‘living part of the stream of science’, requiring a mathematics research library which they equated to a scientific laboratory and a complex of computing rooms which served as an interdisciplinary research centre. Identifying as ‘scientists’, they understood their societal value to be that of researchers, outputting mathematics research valuable to the natural sciences, the emerging field of computer science and the United States government and military, as well as educators. When the building opened in 1965, it was touted by the university administration as an ‘example of excellence’; it later, in 1970, became the site of heated negotiations when university student and faculty protestors staged a sit-in rebuking the Atomic Energy Commission's Computing Center housed on the second floor. A close study of the correspondence between the mathematicians and their peers in the university's administration, private foundations, government agencies and an architectural firm not only illuminates the day-to-day work practices of this eminent group of mathematicians, but also sheds light on their own self-constructed academic and social identities within their contemporaneous Cold War culture.

People's Solidarity (Volkssolidarität) is an East German organization founded in Dresden, Saxony, in 1945. It is primarily known for its activities dedicated to the care of older people. However, in the early 1950s, members of People's Solidarity were also involved in international solidarity campaigns for Greece, North Korea, and Vietnam. This article examines this little-known chapter of the organization's past. It reveals an unusual willingness among older East Germans both to donate money for the benefit of people in distant countries, and to relate to their suffering regardless of the (post-war) hardships faced at home. As the example of People's Solidarity shows, internationalism to some extent informed the roots of everyday, voluntary care practices under socialist rule in East Germany.

The article explores the scenographic rendering of trauma in the theatre performance 872 days. Voices of the besieged city staged by a small theatre, Subbota, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. The performance delves into the complex issues of private narratives of traumatic experiences, which, for decades, were deemed unimportant and even disruptive within the context of victory and glory of The Great Patriotic War. The production is based on memoirs and diaries of witnesses of the Leningrad siege. This study explores the connection between the scenographic ecology and empathic unsettlement, which is understood as a tool of approaching trauma through the experience of the audience. The article analyses how the scenographic rendering of trauma allows for potential representation and understanding of traumatic experience. It further looks at a theatre space as a place for mourning and reflexivity that allows the possibility of working through past trauma to better understand the present.

The asymptotic behavior of the Jaccard index in G(n, p), the classical Erdös–Rényi random graph model, is studied as n goes to infinity. We first derive the asymptotic distribution of the Jaccard index of any pair of distinct vertices, as well as the first two moments of this index. Then the average of the Jaccard indices over all vertex pairs in G(n, p) is shown to be asymptotically normal under an additional mild condition that $np\to\infty$ and $n^2(1-p)\to\infty$.

We calculate the mean throughput, number of collisions, successes, and idle slots for random tree algorithms with successive interference cancellation. Except for the case of the throughput for the binary tree, all the results are new. We furthermore disprove the claim that only the binary tree maximizes throughput. Our method works with many observables and can be used as a blueprint for further analysis.

This dossier explores the ways in which theatre and performance practitioners across the globe have addressed the deeply gendered modes of differential access to public spaces, institutional support, and resources through their creative as well as activist work, during the pandemic and its aftermath. In the last three years, the pandemic has transformed experiences of urban space globally. Access to public space has always been gendered as well as shaped by geographical location, race, caste, class and sexual identity. These traditional modes of differential access have been radically reorganized by the isolation and uncertainty engendered by the global pandemic. While ‘working from home’ was certainly not an option for everyone (most notably, care-workers in an overwhelmingly feminized profession), confinement to domestic space also meant escalating incidents of gendered violence for others. Additionally, the lack of sustainable income opportunities meant, as contributions to this dossier will demonstrate, the stripping away of roofs from over the heads of vulnerable citizens, whether impoverished artistes in want of state support or migrant workers on an uncertain daily wage. Staying at home was no longer an option, because ‘home’ often ceased to exist as a viable shelter, whether literally or by implication. For performers and theatre-workers all over the world, it was a time of intensified precarity: not only a loss of employment and income, but also a growing sense of artistic and professional purposelessness. While some were able to reorient this bewilderment through virtual and digital performances, for many grassroots performers, especially in the global South, access to these modes of public engagement were limited. In countries like India, street theatre activists felt unable and unwilling to switch to the digital space, while the prohibition on public assembly struck an irrevocable blow to women's protest movements.