Best of Summer: The 100-million-year origin story of laughter and humor
Endless Thread
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The Importance of a Sumerian Joke
Historians have suggested that it's our ability to tell all of these fictions that allowed humans to expand their social groups. This Sumerian joke from the dawn of writing matters because it is documented evidence of this moment. It is one of the first instances in which a fiction was written down and its meaning passed to another person who would read it and laugh. And if they don't share your fictions, then they're in the outgroup.
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