“Christianity is a translating religion. Jesus preached in Aramaic, but in Roman Palestine, the language of prestige and commerce was Greek (not Latin, a flub made by Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ”). As a result, just a few of Jesus’s Aramaic words make it into the Gospels; the rest of his teachings were translated to convert the widest possible audience, in Greek. Non-canonical gospels were also written in languages like Syriac and Coptic. It does not seem to have bothered early Christians much that anything critical would get lost in translation.”

“Because Luke kept getting up out of the dirt, even when he was beat, he won the other prisoners’ respect. But the chimps would just not get it. “That’s a complexity of humans,” Faris says: it was not until after the human-chimpanzee split that Homo sapiens developed a newer, uniquely human path to power. Scholars call it “prestige.” Prestige emerged when our ancestors gained the ability to exchange know-how.”

“Scientists working in the desert badlands of northwestern Kenya have found stone tools dating back 3.3 million years, long before the advent of modern humans, and by far the oldest such artifacts yet discovered. The tools, whose makers may or may not have been some sort of human ancestor, push the known date of such tools back by 700,000 years; they also may challenge the notion that our own most direct ancestors were the first to bang two rocks together to create a new technology.”

NY Times: “In a large, continuing study of upward mobility based at Harvard, commuting time has emerged as the single strongest factor in the odds of escaping poverty. The longer an average commute in a given county, the worse the chances of low-income families there moving up the ladder.”