In The Imperial Animal (1998), an important text in the pre-history of EP, Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox identified the following traits as "the behavioral infrastructure of human societies": laws about incest, marriage, and property; habits of taboo; deference to the supernatural, and contrivances to regulate it; courtship rituals; forms of social segregation by gender; a sexual division of labor; the generation of myths and legends; the development of dance; homosexuality; adultery; homicide; suicide; and delinquency (pp. 14-15). According to EP, it is the existence of such perennial traits that enables us to understand, for example, the motivations of characters in the plays of Shakespeare or Sophocles, even though they were written in times radically different to our own. 1
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