Everything we thought we knew about the rise of civilization is wrong. From Popular Science: "Earliest known writing dates back over 40,000 years." From the lede:
New evidence published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates humans experimented with symbolic writing as much as 40,000 years ago. If true, the discoveries dramatically recontextualize the history of communication, given the earliest known written languages are Mesopotamian proto-cuneiforms dating back to around 3000 BCE.
“The artifacts date back to tens of thousands of years before the first writing systems, to the time when Homo sapiens left Africa, settled in Europe, and encountered Neanderthal,” explained Ewa Dutkiewicz, a study co-author and archaeologist at Berlin’s Museum of Prehistory and Early History.
Dutkiewicz and colleagues have spent years analyzing 260 relics recovered from Stone Age cave sites in the Swabian Jura, a remote mountain range located in southwestern Germany. These include a small mammoth figurine carved from the extinct animal’s tusk along with the Adorant, a famous ivory carving that appears to depict a human-lion figure with outstretched arms. These and many other similar artifacts also feature frequently repeating sequences of lines, crosses, dots, and notches.
The patterns were found to be similar to early proto-Cuniform writing.
Notable...but not surprising... how 40,000 years ago the Europeans were doing things that Sub-Saharan Africans still hadn't done when explorers arrived on the continent in the 16th Century.
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