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I’d love for that to be true, but our species dates back 300,000 years, while writing started only 3,000 years ago. Writing is definitely not a fundamental trai
by cpa 1y ago
I’d love for that to be true, but our species dates back 300,000 years, while writing started only 3,000 years ago.
Writing is definitely not a fundamental trait of our species, although once we got this update, things started moving quickly.
- barbazoo 1y agoMore like 5000 or 6000 years ago at least for permanent writing I'd say? I definitely read about cuneiform tablets and cylinders from 3500BCE. Before that might have been on wood so we don't know much about it.
- mattdeboard 1y agoThe oldest known cave paintings are 50,000+ years old. Those count as archived information :) It's pictographic information but it _is_ stored information :) About a hunt or a ceremony or a disaster or ...
- jimkleiber 1y agoWhat about oral histories? Why does it need to be written if it can be memorized and shared verbally?
- mattdeboard 1y agoI think it's very possible there are other species that use "oral history" to convey information to their children, like whales, dolphins, etc., so it's not "safe" -- again just IMO -- to consider it uniquely human.
- bee_rider 1y agoI guess it is hard to say… if you looked at humans in any random moment when we’ve been around, I suppose we’d look a lot like dolphins (not making much increments progress generation-to-generation). But, it does feel like there’s something in our storytelling tendency, maybe just a quantitative difference (we do it a little bit more and some up with slightly better summaries) that creates a qualitative one (positive feedback loop in our ability to reason about the universe). From that point of view, writing is just an iteration of the loop. A big one, though.