article_snippet: It is a common thread through many of the world's dominant religions that those who do not follow the same faith are  barbarians.
article_snippet: Researchers at North Carolina State University studied the origins of 583 religious societies around the world.
article_snippet: Researchers at North Carolina State University compared these to  climate, rainfall and plant growth data for each area to build up a historical picture of the conditions each society was living in.
article_snippet: The findings may help to shed light on how religions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam first emerged and why stories of hardship play such a central role.
article_snippet: the researchers then used trees of evolutionary connections between cultures, deduced from earlier studies of linguistic relationships, to explore how the societies were inter-related and exchanged ideas.
article_snippet: Islam is often seen as having been a civilising influence on Arab culture in the past and millions now make the pilgrimage to Mecca, shown above, every year.
article_snippet: those pictured above were then able to model how the different religions influenced the development of the political structure and cultural complexity in each society.