7 ms·

A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it began

107 points by emot 5mo ago

netcan 5mo ago
Assyriologist Irving Finkel believes Gobekli Tepeh is or is evidence of writing or proto-writing. That's 12,000 bp. There are ice age artefacts that may represent writing-like symbolism. The super-old artefacts themselves are only a hint... but I think more recent artefacts demonstrate that invention of a writing system is relatively common. We tend to think of invention of core concepts as the magical event, with expansion and proliferation as derivative or even inevitable. But... I think this may be backwards. In general... I think purely intellectual feats that can be completed by one person happen over and over. Otoh, we intuitively underestimate the role of context. Availability of trade goods like paper and ink. The application of writing to uses like tax collection, trade contracts, religion, scholarship or whatnot. Those all require many people. Whole societies, economic and political structures. IMO, this is the uniqueness of the early bronze age... for writing and other things. A lot of the writing dirth of the european dark age relates to the scarcity of papyrus. Writing medium seems like a trivial issue. You can write on skins, or bark or shingles. But... that doesn't scale and doesn't lend to the development of writing as a big deal. The invention of cheap paper-making was as important as moveable type for the "Gutenberg Revolution" to take place. Rongorongo is an undeciphered script from Easter Island. From the handful of surviving examples, this is clearly a highly developed script... developed independently on a small island. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo#Corpus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo#Corpus The Cherokee Syllabary is a fascinating example. It was invented by Sequoyah. One guy. He had access to paper, ink and examples of english writing. He (seemingly) didn't have any information on how english writing worked. He borrowed letters from english... but he used them to represent syllables with no relation to latin. EG: the letter "D" represents the sound "A." The ingredients for the invention of a full, advanced, newspaper-ready language were (1) one motivated genius (2) paper and ink (3) an example of how far the idea of writing could take you. There was no proto-writing stage. It wasn't limited to personal seals, charms, prayers, accounting or short documents. I think the key here is example, a demonstration of potential. Sequoyah had seen books, letters and longform text. So, he went straight to newspapers, constitutional documents and suchlike. He taught his young daughter to read and the timeline from initial conception to widespread, advanced literacy was just 20 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary Writing and proto-writing may have been invented tens of thousands of times. Neanderthal proto-writing would be a paradigm-shifting find... but it wouldn't shock me that much. The breakthrough inventions that tend to unlock a flood and punctuate our understanding of history... I think these are often more trivial than we expect. What matters is the ethereal and hard to describe "context." The addition of one or more trivial ingredients like a writing medium. Abstract "meta" like "writing should be used to write whole books." The sociability of the inventor. The growing appreciation of Elamite sophistication adds to the shockingly large corpus of large, advanced civilizations that have existed in history. There are so many of them... and we don't even know what most were called.
- card_zero 5mo ago
  Heh, that's a fun point. Maybe even a deep point. They don't have to leave a long trail of artifacts of incremental groping toward the concept of written language, starting with seal icons and tally marks and then account ledgers and then complaint letters. Instead, somebody could just have the idea, all of a sudden, if conditions are right to suggest it. Or several people could. But this raises the question of how big an idea it's possible for one person to have all at once, without handing it between multiple people in evolutionary stages. I guess there's no real limit on that, it's just that excellent ideas require excellent zeitgeist conditions (like the availability of paper that you mention).
  - netcan 5mo ago
    So... The "big idea" would be "a writing system that fully represents a language." Everything else can develop gradually. But... gradually doesn't necessarily mean generations. It can be one person expirementing, working on the project and until completion. Think of it as a "master work" or a PhD. Big, but not beyond the right person's ability to complete over a decade. Think Newton, Galileo or Tolkien. They didn't just "have an idea" that fully worked. But... they worked on their ideas for years, got a lot done themselves, and had fruitful projects. People are people. What is possible in one century is possible in another, unless prerequisites are not present. In the case of language... the centuries of development mostly contribute the ambition itself. The inventor may not be doing some great project. They might be just inventing something small to help keep track of sales... or they're just inventing a gambling game that uses symbols.
- lproven 5mo ago
  > There was no proto-writing stage. Sequoyah was a great man, a genius, no doubt... but I think it is important to note that he didn't go straight to an alphabet. It was his third try. The first go was logograms: he made up symbols for words. Then he realised this would be too complicated and hard to remember, which speaking as an adult who learned to write a few words of Chinese and Japanese, I fervently agree with. Then his second go was ideograms: symbols for ideas instead. The problem is similar and he dismissed that, too. His third try was the Cherokee syllabary: one symbol per syllable, similarly to Hiragana and Katakana for anyone else who suffered through beginner's Japanese. In a way, I think this makes it considerably more impressive. He worked through millennia of the evolution of writing in a decade or so. It's astounding. (And I can't read it, and I'm ashamed by that, but then I do not know a word of Cherokee and live on a different continent.)
roughly 5mo ago
There are two relatively recent books that dig in on the relationship between humans and governments or states and the degree to which these were less of a linear history and more of an ongoing negotiation - Against the Grain by James C Scott focuses on early states and their semi-regular failures, and The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow talk about the ongoing process of power negotiations between the putative leadership class and the citizenry. Both emphasize the same thing: that retrenchments against the state were a regular occurrence, and that the citizens of a given ruling group would not infrequently challenge, abolish, or abandon the state if the rulers overreached. The sudden disappearance of a script that was used for the purposes of tracking ownership and accounts would fit with this view, especially in light of even more modern reactions to attempts by the state to codify relationships for, eg, tax purposes, or just generally for control.
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
retrac 5mo ago
We may never truly know when writing was invented. There's a stele that was discovered in 1986 [1] in Veracruz. You could be forgiven if you think that writing is Maya. But it is not. It some other language. A couple other small fragments like it have been found, but the stele is basically an hapax. It is the only example. And from the one example, we can see that it a system overflowingly glorious in its maturity and complexity. The scribes belonged to a culture that had been writing for a very long time. That is the refinement of millennia. There are dates carved on La Mojorra 1; if they are in the same Long Count calendar the Maya used, then the stele appears to be talking about something that happened in the 140s and 150s AD. The obvious relationship between the Mesoamerican writing systems might be somewhat analogous to the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, or Chinese and Japanese writing. One was adapted to write the other. Or they both evolved out of a common ancestral system. How far back might that have been? [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_Schematics.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...
- Baeocystin 5mo ago
  That is a fantastic example of mesoamerican script. I would have naively assumed it was Maya had you not said otherwise otherwise, too. Thanks for posting it.
- riffraff 5mo ago
  I don't get it, why do you deduce this is "the refinement of millennia"? How can you tell that a script is "refined", especially from a single example?
  - hattmall 5mo ago
    Mainly from the amount and complexity of symbols. That gives rise to the context which they must include. We can tell from the other more complete examples we have seen that writing systems which are complex enough to reliably convey such a wide range of context generally require being refined over millennia. It's not a 100% given, but it's a very reasonable assertion.
pier25 5mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Elamite_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Elamite_script
aix1 5mo ago
I am a bit disappointed by New Scientist's standard of reporting here. "Has been shockingly overlooked by all but a handful of scholars since its discovery 125 years ago" -- really? I picked up the one popular book on the subject that I own. It was first published almost 25 years ago and has an entire chapter on proto-Elamite, plus about a dozen mentions throughout the book. Everything seems to have some sort of fake narrative these days to make it more "interesting". <old-man-yells-at-cloud/> P.S. Highly recommend the book: https://www.thamesandhudson.com/products/lost-languages https://www.thamesandhudson.com/products/lost-languages
- poulpy123 5mo ago
  The clickbaitisation of science vulgarisation (you'll not believe what new scientist did in their next article !)
Panzerschrek 5mo ago
The fact that elamites suddenly stopped writing is easy to explain. Maybe they have invented paper or something similar and it doesn't last long in the archeological record.
- masklinn 5mo ago
  > Maybe they have invented paper or something similar and it doesn't last long in the archeological record. These can last a very long while in the archaeological record if the environment is suitable, and the area covered by elam (the iranian south-west) seems pretty suitable. The oldest surviving papyruses are the 4500 years old "red sea scrolls". Similarly we have paper fragments from shockingly early in the medium's history (~150 BCE, papermaking is believed to have been invented circa 200 BCE). Given how long Elam lasted, it would be very strange that none of this successor materials would have survived even in telling (e.g. we do not have examples of the oldest chinese bamboo slips, but we do have references to such from later works), and that it would not have spread out of elam either.
- poulpy123 5mo ago
  No, it's easy to hypotheses about but not to explain without more information
GeekyBear 5mo ago
Professor emeritus Irving Finkel of the British Museum thinks that we have evidence from much farther back in history. > Controversial theory about Göbekli Tepe | Irving Finkel and Lex Fridman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0BcGMaEV8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0BcGMaEV8o This interview sent me down a Finkel interview rabbit hole, as he makes a delightful guest.
- vintagedave 5mo ago
  Is it possible to summarise? I can't watch a video currently. I'm also aware Göbekli Tepe is a favourite of pseudoarcheologists and conspiracy theorists. Given who Finkel is, it will be nice to see a theory presented by someone who is actually a genuine expert! :)
  - GeekyBear 5mo ago
    The link is to a clip of the relevant portion of a longer interview. One of the artifacts found at a Göbekli Tepe dig was a pictographic seal stone.
  - card_zero 5mo ago
    Here's a blog post about it from an involved and irritated archeologist: https://trowelandpen.com/2025/12/22/hidden-in-plain-sight-did-archaeologists-really-overlook-evidence-for-early-writing-at-gobekli-tepe/ https://trowelandpen.com/2025/12/22/hidden-in-plain-sight-di... > Did this small stone represent the very beginnings of writing, about 12,000 years ago? And did archaeologists really overlook such an important find all this time? (Spoiler: No, it doesn’t. And we didn’t.) Hmm, but later in the post, discussing neolithic symbols from the wider region: > Interestingly, among these depictions there are some which indeed appear to be symbolic substitutes for more complex images, like the bucranium (ox head) in place of a full aurochs, or arrow-like zigzag lines representing snakes, and large birds reduced to a few characteristic lines. These depictions and their “abbreviations” seem to adhere to a certain convention, kind of a standardisation even, suggesting a communication system that uses these stone objects as media to store important information and knowledge. But totally not writing, yo. It's unfair to attack archaeologists, who only busy diligently doing their job, increasing the store of public knowledge, and winning awards from each other. Except sometimes they deserve it, so I'm going to attack them by saying that they hate to be specific. It's a huge risk, you might be wrong, or ridiculed as a crank, or you might attract cranks. Better to couch everything in language that lets you avoid saying the thing. On the other hand we have the 40,000 year old mammoth carving from Germany (see Sci Am article in a different comment) with decorative cross patterns on it, touted as "statistically complex" and conveying information, when they're just badly carved decoration. In that case they were simultaneously pussyfooting around about stating their case and going off on a flight of fancy, at the same time, in the style of "I'm not saying it's aliens".
KingOfCoders 5mo ago
Ah the new science. 3/4th about how everyone else was wrong, how this was neglected, how this changes everything and then a small portion about what it is. Recently I found this very interesting, signs of writing about 40.000 years ago. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stone-age-art-may-reveal-40-000-year-old-precursor-to-writing/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stone-age-art-may...
- poulpy123 5mo ago
  I've read the paper and I don't find it really convincing. The reasoning works for the proto-cuneiform tablets because we have the historical context in support, but we don't have it in this case.
  - KingOfCoders 5mo ago
    What did you find not convincing in particular? "Our results strongly contradict the hypothesis that the sign sequences of the Swabian Aurignacian constitute writing in this strict sense." You think it does constitute writing?
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
nephihaha 5mo ago
The roots of writing appear to be in the Stone Age. Pre-literate societies have a certain degree of symbology. You can see this with native Australians into the modern period and ancient rock art.
- tdeck 5mo ago
  Another example are the winter counts used by Plains tribes, which used various symbols to remind the "reader" of particular memorable events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_count Or in Asia the Dongba script, which to me looks like a series of cartoon panels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongba_symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongba_symbols
  - nephihaha 5mo ago
    The Winter Count is more in that ballpark, and looks like an independent creation. The first recognised alphabet in the Americas would be runic, but practically every supposed example outside Greenland seems to be controversial. I do believe that Mesoamerican script would have evolved into an alphabet eventually and a number of North American tribes were moving towards a script independently. The Dongpa symbols look like they have some influence from Chinese characters somewhere down the line (much like some of the North American syllabaries are influenced by the Roman alphabet).
egorfine 5mo ago
I read "ancient script" and my first though was: what kind of script? Like, REXX for OS/2? ksh? Maybe even perl?
user2722 5mo ago
The half of the story which was available was indeed fascinating. Dates I'll retain, 1.7 million years and 5000 years. Two different, if associated, marks of civilization.
rballpug 5mo ago
Right to left, left to right. Circular. The interpunct is a centered dot [·] Greco semicolon.

107 points by emot 5mo ago

Assyriologist Irving Finkel believes Gobekli Tepeh is or is evidence of writing or proto-writing. That's 12,000 bp. There are ice age artefacts that may represent writing-like symbolism. The super-old artefacts themselves are only a hint... but I think more recent artefacts demonstrate that invention of a writing system is relatively common. We tend to think of invention of core concepts as the magical event, with expansion and proliferation as derivative or even inevitable. But... I think this may be backwards. In general... I think purely intellectual feats that can be completed by one person happen over and over. Otoh, we intuitively underestimate the role of context. Availability of trade goods like paper and ink. The application of writing to uses like tax collection, trade contracts, religion, scholarship or whatnot. Those all require many people. Whole societies, economic and political structures. IMO, this is the uniqueness of the early bronze age... for writing and other things. A lot of the writing dirth of the european dark age relates to the scarcity of papyrus. Writing medium seems like a trivial issue. You can write on skins, or bark or shingles. But... that doesn't scale and doesn't lend to the development of writing as a big deal. The invention of cheap paper-making was as important as moveable type for the "Gutenberg Revolution" to take place. Rongorongo is an undeciphered script from Easter Island. From the handful of surviving examples, this is clearly a highly developed script... developed independently on a small island. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo#Corpus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo#Corpus The Cherokee Syllabary is a fascinating example. It was invented by Sequoyah. One guy. He had access to paper, ink and examples of english writing. He (seemingly) didn't have any information on how english writing worked. He borrowed letters from english... but he used them to represent syllables with no relation to latin. EG: the letter "D" represents the sound "A." The ingredients for the invention of a full, advanced, newspaper-ready language were (1) one motivated genius (2) paper and ink (3) an example of how far the idea of writing could take you. There was no proto-writing stage. It wasn't limited to personal seals, charms, prayers, accounting or short documents. I think the key here is example, a demonstration of potential. Sequoyah had seen books, letters and longform text. So, he went straight to newspapers, constitutional documents and suchlike. He taught his young daughter to read and the timeline from initial conception to widespread, advanced literacy was just 20 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary Writing and proto-writing may have been invented tens of thousands of times. Neanderthal proto-writing would be a paradigm-shifting find... but it wouldn't shock me that much. The breakthrough inventions that tend to unlock a flood and punctuate our understanding of history... I think these are often more trivial than we expect. What matters is the ethereal and hard to describe "context." The addition of one or more trivial ingredients like a writing medium. Abstract "meta" like "writing should be used to write whole books." The sociability of the inventor. The growing appreciation of Elamite sophistication adds to the shockingly large corpus of large, advanced civilizations that have existed in history. There are so many of them... and we don't even know what most were called.

card_zero 5mo ago
Heh, that's a fun point. Maybe even a deep point. They don't have to leave a long trail of artifacts of incremental groping toward the concept of written language, starting with seal icons and tally marks and then account ledgers and then complaint letters. Instead, somebody could just have the idea, all of a sudden, if conditions are right to suggest it. Or several people could. But this raises the question of how big an idea it's possible for one person to have all at once, without handing it between multiple people in evolutionary stages. I guess there's no real limit on that, it's just that excellent ideas require excellent zeitgeist conditions (like the availability of paper that you mention).
- netcan 5mo ago
  So... The "big idea" would be "a writing system that fully represents a language." Everything else can develop gradually. But... gradually doesn't necessarily mean generations. It can be one person expirementing, working on the project and until completion. Think of it as a "master work" or a PhD. Big, but not beyond the right person's ability to complete over a decade. Think Newton, Galileo or Tolkien. They didn't just "have an idea" that fully worked. But... they worked on their ideas for years, got a lot done themselves, and had fruitful projects. People are people. What is possible in one century is possible in another, unless prerequisites are not present. In the case of language... the centuries of development mostly contribute the ambition itself. The inventor may not be doing some great project. They might be just inventing something small to help keep track of sales... or they're just inventing a gambling game that uses symbols.
lproven 5mo ago
> There was no proto-writing stage. Sequoyah was a great man, a genius, no doubt... but I think it is important to note that he didn't go straight to an alphabet. It was his third try. The first go was logograms: he made up symbols for words. Then he realised this would be too complicated and hard to remember, which speaking as an adult who learned to write a few words of Chinese and Japanese, I fervently agree with. Then his second go was ideograms: symbols for ideas instead. The problem is similar and he dismissed that, too. His third try was the Cherokee syllabary: one symbol per syllable, similarly to Hiragana and Katakana for anyone else who suffered through beginner's Japanese. In a way, I think this makes it considerably more impressive. He worked through millennia of the evolution of writing in a decade or so. It's astounding. (And I can't read it, and I'm ashamed by that, but then I do not know a word of Cherokee and live on a different continent.)

roughly 5mo ago

There are two relatively recent books that dig in on the relationship between humans and governments or states and the degree to which these were less of a linear history and more of an ongoing negotiation - Against the Grain by James C Scott focuses on early states and their semi-regular failures, and The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow talk about the ongoing process of power negotiations between the putative leadership class and the citizenry. Both emphasize the same thing: that retrenchments against the state were a regular occurrence, and that the citizens of a given ruling group would not infrequently challenge, abolish, or abandon the state if the rulers overreached. The sudden disappearance of a script that was used for the purposes of tracking ownership and accounts would fit with this view, especially in light of even more modern reactions to attempts by the state to codify relationships for, eg, tax purposes, or just generally for control.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]

retrac 5mo ago

We may never truly know when writing was invented. There's a stele that was discovered in 1986 [1] in Veracruz. You could be forgiven if you think that writing is Maya. But it is not. It some other language. A couple other small fragments like it have been found, but the stele is basically an hapax. It is the only example. And from the one example, we can see that it a system overflowingly glorious in its maturity and complexity. The scribes belonged to a culture that had been writing for a very long time. That is the refinement of millennia. There are dates carved on La Mojorra 1; if they are in the same Long Count calendar the Maya used, then the stele appears to be talking about something that happened in the 140s and 150s AD. The obvious relationship between the Mesoamerican writing systems might be somewhat analogous to the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, or Chinese and Japanese writing. One was adapted to write the other. Or they both evolved out of a common ancestral system. How far back might that have been? [1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_Schematics.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...

Baeocystin 5mo ago
That is a fantastic example of mesoamerican script. I would have naively assumed it was Maya had you not said otherwise otherwise, too. Thanks for posting it.
riffraff 5mo ago
I don't get it, why do you deduce this is "the refinement of millennia"? How can you tell that a script is "refined", especially from a single example?
- hattmall 5mo ago
  Mainly from the amount and complexity of symbols. That gives rise to the context which they must include. We can tell from the other more complete examples we have seen that writing systems which are complex enough to reliably convey such a wide range of context generally require being refined over millennia. It's not a 100% given, but it's a very reasonable assertion.

pier25 5mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Elamite_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Elamite_script

aix1 5mo ago

I am a bit disappointed by New Scientist's standard of reporting here. "Has been shockingly overlooked by all but a handful of scholars since its discovery 125 years ago" -- really? I picked up the one popular book on the subject that I own. It was first published almost 25 years ago and has an entire chapter on proto-Elamite, plus about a dozen mentions throughout the book. Everything seems to have some sort of fake narrative these days to make it more "interesting". <old-man-yells-at-cloud/> P.S. Highly recommend the book: https://www.thamesandhudson.com/products/lost-languages https://www.thamesandhudson.com/products/lost-languages

poulpy123 5mo ago
The clickbaitisation of science vulgarisation (you'll not believe what new scientist did in their next article !)

Panzerschrek 5mo ago

The fact that elamites suddenly stopped writing is easy to explain. Maybe they have invented paper or something similar and it doesn't last long in the archeological record.

masklinn 5mo ago
> Maybe they have invented paper or something similar and it doesn't last long in the archeological record. These can last a very long while in the archaeological record if the environment is suitable, and the area covered by elam (the iranian south-west) seems pretty suitable. The oldest surviving papyruses are the 4500 years old "red sea scrolls". Similarly we have paper fragments from shockingly early in the medium's history (~150 BCE, papermaking is believed to have been invented circa 200 BCE). Given how long Elam lasted, it would be very strange that none of this successor materials would have survived even in telling (e.g. we do not have examples of the oldest chinese bamboo slips, but we do have references to such from later works), and that it would not have spread out of elam either.
poulpy123 5mo ago
No, it's easy to hypotheses about but not to explain without more information

GeekyBear 5mo ago

Professor emeritus Irving Finkel of the British Museum thinks that we have evidence from much farther back in history. > Controversial theory about Göbekli Tepe | Irving Finkel and Lex Fridman https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0BcGMaEV8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0BcGMaEV8o This interview sent me down a Finkel interview rabbit hole, as he makes a delightful guest.

vintagedave 5mo ago
Is it possible to summarise? I can't watch a video currently. I'm also aware Göbekli Tepe is a favourite of pseudoarcheologists and conspiracy theorists. Given who Finkel is, it will be nice to see a theory presented by someone who is actually a genuine expert! :)
- GeekyBear 5mo ago
  The link is to a clip of the relevant portion of a longer interview. One of the artifacts found at a Göbekli Tepe dig was a pictographic seal stone.
- card_zero 5mo ago
  Here's a blog post about it from an involved and irritated archeologist: https://trowelandpen.com/2025/12/22/hidden-in-plain-sight-did-archaeologists-really-overlook-evidence-for-early-writing-at-gobekli-tepe/ https://trowelandpen.com/2025/12/22/hidden-in-plain-sight-di... > Did this small stone represent the very beginnings of writing, about 12,000 years ago? And did archaeologists really overlook such an important find all this time? (Spoiler: No, it doesn’t. And we didn’t.) Hmm, but later in the post, discussing neolithic symbols from the wider region: > Interestingly, among these depictions there are some which indeed appear to be symbolic substitutes for more complex images, like the bucranium (ox head) in place of a full aurochs, or arrow-like zigzag lines representing snakes, and large birds reduced to a few characteristic lines. These depictions and their “abbreviations” seem to adhere to a certain convention, kind of a standardisation even, suggesting a communication system that uses these stone objects as media to store important information and knowledge. But totally not writing, yo. It's unfair to attack archaeologists, who only busy diligently doing their job, increasing the store of public knowledge, and winning awards from each other. Except sometimes they deserve it, so I'm going to attack them by saying that they hate to be specific. It's a huge risk, you might be wrong, or ridiculed as a crank, or you might attract cranks. Better to couch everything in language that lets you avoid saying the thing. On the other hand we have the 40,000 year old mammoth carving from Germany (see Sci Am article in a different comment) with decorative cross patterns on it, touted as "statistically complex" and conveying information, when they're just badly carved decoration. In that case they were simultaneously pussyfooting around about stating their case and going off on a flight of fancy, at the same time, in the style of "I'm not saying it's aliens".

KingOfCoders 5mo ago

Ah the new science. 3/4th about how everyone else was wrong, how this was neglected, how this changes everything and then a small portion about what it is. Recently I found this very interesting, signs of writing about 40.000 years ago. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stone-age-art-may-reveal-40-000-year-old-precursor-to-writing/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stone-age-art-may...

poulpy123 5mo ago
I've read the paper and I don't find it really convincing. The reasoning works for the proto-cuneiform tablets because we have the historical context in support, but we don't have it in this case.
- KingOfCoders 5mo ago
  What did you find not convincing in particular? "Our results strongly contradict the hypothesis that the sign sequences of the Swabian Aurignacian constitute writing in this strict sense." You think it does constitute writing?
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]

nephihaha 5mo ago

The roots of writing appear to be in the Stone Age. Pre-literate societies have a certain degree of symbology. You can see this with native Australians into the modern period and ancient rock art.

tdeck 5mo ago
Another example are the winter counts used by Plains tribes, which used various symbols to remind the "reader" of particular memorable events: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_count Or in Asia the Dongba script, which to me looks like a series of cartoon panels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongba_symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dongba_symbols
- nephihaha 5mo ago
  The Winter Count is more in that ballpark, and looks like an independent creation. The first recognised alphabet in the Americas would be runic, but practically every supposed example outside Greenland seems to be controversial. I do believe that Mesoamerican script would have evolved into an alphabet eventually and a number of North American tribes were moving towards a script independently. The Dongpa symbols look like they have some influence from Chinese characters somewhere down the line (much like some of the North American syllabaries are influenced by the Roman alphabet).

egorfine 5mo ago

I read "ancient script" and my first though was: what kind of script? Like, REXX for OS/2? ksh? Maybe even perl?

user2722 5mo ago

The half of the story which was available was indeed fascinating. Dates I'll retain, 1.7 million years and 5000 years. Two different, if associated, marks of civilization.

rballpug 5mo ago

Right to left, left to right. Circular. The interpunct is a centered dot [·] Greco semicolon.