adrian_b 13 hours ago

This does not seem very likely, because earlier than this people did not really need a writing system. More precisely, they had no reason to believe that a writing system would be useful, so there was no pressure to invent one.

In Mesopotamia we can see the evolution over many hundreds of years and even a few millennia from an accounting system that used a few symbols for the things that were recorded, to a full fledged writing system that was able to record any spoken sentence.

Before the societies of Mesopotamia and Egypt, which required a complex management of the available resources, there was no need for accounting with written records for great quantities of varied goods.

It is likely that for tens of thousands of years people have been able to make drawings that recorded useful things, like maps, and they probably have used some sets of symbols for various important things, like kinds of humans, kinds of animals, kinds of plants and so on.

Nevertheless, it is very unlikely that any such set of symbols used in the distant past has ever been able to record any complete sentence spoken in their language, with all the grammatical markers that do not have a concrete meaning.

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shakna 4 hours ago

The Mayans were writing with knotted rope around 1900BCE, so I would very much say it wouldn't be beyond possibility. Most of the early use was for tracking the seasons for religious rites - a pressure for developing writing that would exist across most early cultures.

WalterBright 2 hours ago

I wonder about the knotted rope. How much information could it contain? Not very much. It's hard to imagine it being very useful.

r14c 1 hour ago

Not sure which technology OP is talking about, but quipu at least are can store information like census records and dates. Similar concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

mistercheph 13 hours ago

How do you know so much about the motivations of people that have been dead for tens of thousands of years? Maybe you can speak to the dead?

adrian_b 13 hours ago

The people from fifty thousand years ago do not differ in any essential way from the people of today, except in the knowledge and in the set of skills that they were taught.

Most human societies that have not seen a writing system at other people have never invented any writing system.

All those that are likely to have invented writing independently (though for some of them it is not certain that they have not seen the writing used by others) have invented writing systems in contexts similar to those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, i.e. in a settled agricultural society where cooperation was required at a large scale and management and accounting of resources was necessary.

Amezarak 13 hours ago

I get what you're saying, but I also think it's hard to overstate how different ancient cultures and experiences made people.

WalterBright 2 hours ago

If you're a nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe, you're not going to carry around clay tablets that say "Happy Birthday, love Gramma" on them.

biorach 13 hours ago

Their point is that hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers have no use for a writing system. A complex urban society does.