This is the first episode of a two-part series on the origin of jokes and humor. The story appears in podcast feeds under the title, "Jokes, Part I: Sumer Funny, Sumer Not." Listen to part two here.

Miguel Civil, a scholar and researcher at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, was a leading expert on the Sumerian language, the earliest known written language. “No one has known Sumerian ...

You have to go back 4,000 years, colleagues said, to find someone as fluent in Sumerian as Miguel Civil. A Catalonian-born professor with a purported photographic memory, he spent decades studying ...