20

Linguistic studies indicate that human languages were not that different from modern languages 6000 and 7000 years ago. They had distinguishable sounds, vowels, consonants, syllables, roots and stems and so on.

Biology also indicates that mental abilities of humans changed little over at least the last 100000 years.

I wonder why no form of writing ever emerged before some 7000-9000 years ago, even logographic, symbolic, runic or any other kind?

I also wonder why the writing emerged nearly simultaniously in unrelated parts of the world (America, Africa, East Asia). Even if there was distance of some thousands of years between emergence of these writing systems, it still looks quite simultanious compared to the scale of some 100000-200000 years of the history of the modern human.

Why did no form of writing or symbolic expression appear independently in any part of the world, say 15-20 thousand years ago or so?

T.E.D.
  • 118,977
  • 15
  • 300
  • 471
Anixx
  • 32,728
  • 13
  • 90
  • 183
  • 5
    This article might be of some help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution – jfrankcarr Apr 29 '12 at 22:52
  • 1
    There are two theories on how evolution works; one is that changes happen over a long period of time, a mutation occurs, the mutation doesn't kill the creature, but instead helps it, so the mutation gets passed on, and after 100000 years, the entire species has the mutation. The other theory is that something in the environment forces a many random mutations in the species, and the ones that worked get passed on. I'm not an expert in the period you are talking about, but, I'd guess that something changed in the environment and caused a mutation in the human brain to allow writing. – Russell Apr 30 '12 at 06:20
  • 2
    @Russell: Umm...Mutations do happen all the time and successful ones propagate as species that have them have a survival advantage. I don't think there's any doubt about that. Also while there're definitely structures in the human brain that allow something like writing to happen, the OP already mentioned that there was little change in the brain in the past 100K years. Apart from that, there's little reason to think that there's a specific gene that controls whether a person can write or not. – Opt Apr 30 '12 at 07:19
  • 5
    Note that currently all nations and races can write, even those who were in no contact for more than 10000 years. A mutation could not spread to the people all over the world (notice that there are ancient mutations that still did not spread over one continent, Europe). – Anixx Apr 30 '12 at 08:19
  • 5
    Also if the mutation happened only so recently, we would have a certain percent of people who could not write. There was no bottleneck for ability to write because many nations had no writing up to modern times (but all their members can write well if properly taught). – Anixx Apr 30 '12 at 08:24
  • 1
    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because hypothetical questions about history are virtually impossible to answer. – TheHonRose Sep 06 '17 at 15:06
  • 1
    Biology also indicates that mental abilities of humans changed little over at least the last 100000 years. Wait, what? What gives you the idea that biology can tell us such a thing? We have absolutely no scientific tools for testing such a hypothesis. –  Sep 07 '17 at 02:58

4 Answers4

37

The concept of writing appears to be something that societies naturally stumble upon when they reach a certain level of stratification and density. In other words, they have to be developed enough to need writing.

In pretty much all known cases it was first used chiefly for accounting, and then evolved to keep track of the accomplishments of kings.

So what appears to be a prerequisite for the development of writing is a settled, stratified society that has enough trade to support full-time accountants and enough stratification to support kings.

That only happens in settled farming societies. So the development of writing had to wait for the development of settled intensive farming of domesticated crops - AKA a Neolithic society. This didn't happen until about 9000 BCE. So you have to start your clock there.

T.E.D.
  • 118,977
  • 15
  • 300
  • 471
  • 4
    @T.E.D.: Might also be worth mentioning what was happening all over the Northern Hemisphere for the period 100,000 years ago up to about 11,000 years ago - A mile-thick ice sheet covering most of it that dramatically interfered with the development of civilization by preventing the scale of population density that supports it. The retreat of this massive ice sheet is likely the reason for the Neolithic revolution to occur about the same point in time across the Northern Hemisphere. – Pieter Geerkens Sep 07 '17 at 09:34
  • 2
    @PieterGeerkens - I do think the development of agriculture was somehow enabled by the onset of the interglacial. The timing is spot on, and I don't believe in coincidences that big. However, since the ice sheets never reached down to the areas that first domesticated plants, I'm not real sure about the exact mechanism. Either way, the OP asked about writing, not agriculture. – T.E.D. Sep 07 '17 at 13:13
  • I am going to suggest that an alphabet was an invention beyond hindu-arabic numerals in originality/cleverness so the reason it took so long is that it does not inevitably develop and that is why at least modern writing took so long to develop -- why did hindu-arabic numeral/place holding representation take so long? – Jeff Sep 07 '17 at 16:25
  • @Jeff - An alphabet? I'd agree. There's probably an answer here somewhere where I went into this, but in short a syllabary has been independently invented a few times, but never (to my knowledge) an alphabet. It was really a freak accident of linguistics that allowed its invention. There was a language with a syllabary that didn't need separate glyphs for vowels because they were predicable, so they could drop 4/5th of the glyphs needed.Then its writing system got adopted by speakers of a language that didn't have that feature, and rather than come up with 5x as many glyphs, they found a hack. – T.E.D. Sep 07 '17 at 18:05
  • 1
    @Jeff - ...however a syllabary is a sufficiently advanced enough form of writing to be getting on with. Many eastern languages don't even go that far, and at best use a pictographic/syllabary hybrid (if not outright pictographic). That seems to serve their communications needs sufficiently for their purposes. So talk about an alphabet specifically is probably off-topic for this question. – T.E.D. Sep 07 '17 at 18:11
  • @T.E.D.: I know that pictographic written language arose in different place and are probably very ancient -- I don't think we can know that they originated only 9 thousand years ago. But alphabets not originating sooner I am saying is because it is such a novel idea. I don't think syllabary is much different than an alphabet and would naturally lead to one and so those too are novel ideas -- not sure they originated more than once independently. – Jeff Sep 07 '17 at 18:43
  • One of the reasons you need large-scale and stratified societies to develop writing is because it is only useful -- and hence developed and extended -- if you have a strong need to exchange and retain information beyond the local village and an individual human's memory. For nearly all of human existence the village here and now was 99.9% of life and writing added negligible utility. – Mark Olson Aug 19 '23 at 14:05
  • @T.E.D.: Speaking of pictographic languages, specifically in China - the advantage of its pictographic writing is that it then evolved in symbiosis with all of Chinese languages as a universal script. For example, both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers can read traditional Chinese script, even though they pronounce the symbols in mutually incomprehensible phonemes. – Pieter Geerkens Aug 19 '23 at 18:23
  • Incas never developed a written script though, so I think that kinda challenges your hypothesis that settled and startified farming societies develop writing out of need. Incas used oral tranmission + quipu for keeping track of accounting and things like that. No actual writing needed. It doesn't seem to just develop naturally. – setszu Aug 20 '23 at 00:45
  • @setszu - They had a rather unique information recording system of their own devising, called Quipu. It wasn't writing only in the most technical literal sense, but was used for all the purposes other societies developed their writing systems for. – T.E.D. Aug 20 '23 at 01:59
  • @T.E.D. Yeah I mentioned this already. It only "works" if you really stretch the definition of writing to just mean literally any information-recording system, but I think it basically commits the moving the goalposts fallacy. And I wouldn't say it does everything that formal writing scripts could do honestly, that'd probably be false equivalence fallacy. – setszu Aug 20 '23 at 02:25
  • @setszu - That's only a good argument when what's important to you is the mechanics of writing, vs. what it actually accomplishes. The existence of Quipu is in fact the exact thing that first got me thinking along these lines, as expressed in the answer. – T.E.D. Aug 20 '23 at 02:34
14

Civilization only began in the past 8000 years or so. If you have a civilization, there's a much bigger need of a writing system (for record keeping for instance) than there's without a civilization so that might be part of the explanation.

I should add that although there wasn't a writing system before 10K years ago, we do have cave paintings going back to 30K years ago.

Opt
  • 3,882
  • 1
  • 28
  • 33
8

Given that the earliest prehistoric art dates from around 35-40 000 years BCE, we can cautiously say that by then they were capable of symbolic representation, and potentially capable of writing.

Writing in at least one sense is much more difficult than art of any kind in that it requires a sustained development of vocabulary and grammar, probably over several generations, and this means a large enough group of people willing to sustain this development; I imagine that need wasn't felt strongly enough until things need to be accounted for in settled communities such as cities.

Mozibur Ullah
  • 2,710
  • 19
  • 33
  • Here's a rrecent discovery supporting the first point, that Paleolithic proto-writing must be a thing even though we don't yet understand much about it. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/an-upper-palaeolithic-protowriting-system-and-phenological-calendar/6F2AD8A705888F2226FE857840B4FE19 – Brian Z Aug 19 '23 at 14:58
2

The first thing is that we do not know how difficult it is to invent scripture if you haven't it. In retrospect things which we consider now "easy" were judged as rubbish or impossible.

The second thing: It is entirely possible that it was invented far before the known scriptures, even as far as 100 000 BC. But how could we know ?

Lets say our culture will be wiped out by a global catastrophe. What will remain of our culture ?

All the computer media ? Destroyed in decades.
Books, scriptures, microfilm ? Destroyed in centuries.

Only metal/stone/ivory engravings under favorable circumstances would be able to last 10 000 years or more and now think how much of our knowledge will remain. So it is possible that ancient people wrote but used materials like us which were not able to last this timespans. Sure, they could have engraved them on the things we found. But very old findings are very rare (we simply missed them) or they did not use them for cultural reasons (taboo).

As long as we have no proof we must assume that they did not write.

Thorsten S.
  • 5,146
  • 1
  • 24
  • 39
  • 4
    I'm afraid all this sounds like conjecture and "what if". Not really a studied answer to the question. – Rajib Jun 16 '14 at 02:56
  • Uh, history is conjecture and "what if". The fine thing about "studied answers" is that they have some indices to work on (scriptures, sources etc.) to rule some hypotheses out. These simply do not exist for the very reason I told you. Tell me what do you expect as a "studied answer". – Thorsten S. Jun 16 '14 at 03:02
  • 1
    'history is conjecture and "what if"'. Not really. Your answer "Lets say our culture will be wiped out by a global catastrophe" is fit for science fiction - not HSE. You may like to reword your answer, if it is your claim that writing did exist prior to 9000 years ago. – Rajib Jun 16 '14 at 14:39
  • 1
    @Rajib Please reread the answer and do not state what it does not state. My claim is not that writing did exist prior to 9000 years ago, I even directly state it in the last sentence. My answer is: We do not know because we have no idea how difficult it is to invent writing, all people we could ask are dead and every other source we could use is likely decayed. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. – Thorsten S. Jun 16 '14 at 14:54
  • What is your answer to the OP question? i.e. why was writing not invented earlier? I BTW have not stated anything- I merely suggested you clean up your answer to be less confusing/convoluted wrt the original question. – Rajib Jun 16 '14 at 15:29
  • What's your source for saying all computer media would be destroyed in decades? I would expect an SSD stored in a dry, sheltered location to have an indefinite lifespan. – Carey Gregory May 13 '20 at 19:03