Lately--which, lately, means the past few years--I've been taking in a lot of youtube videos and articles about the earliest evidence of writing.

The Tartaria Tablets were found in Romania and could be from as far back as 5,500 BCE. They may not be literary or communicating a wide scope of information, but there appear to be abstractions in the engravings that depict things at a level deeper than the symbology of pictographs, denoting sounds aka letters as opposed to images of things.

Writing is one of those things thats taught about as a defining characteristic of "civilization," + food surplus + division of labor + organization, which creates an interest in pinning down the place where writing started, so that a claim to first civilization can be made.

Marking first civilizations is rarely about historical accuracy or filling the record, though. The line is used as the hard boundary between pre- and history.

Saying that writing started with cuneiform in 3500/4000 BCE and didn't exist before does the same work of saying the world is 6000 years old. Peeping the real gradient of symbolic markings opens up history. It makes it so much wider.

Algos prolly saw my interest in where writing came from and starting feeding me more anthro history etc.

And I find myself thinking that there's no way language has only been in use ~10,000 years.

The parts of the brain that are supposed to mainly deal with communication have been in our and related species' brains for 20-30 million years. Gestural communication existing alongside the advent of homo sapien seems more likely to me. 2 million years? 500,000 years of speech?

82,000-year-old shell beads from North Africa and implications for the origins of modern human behavior

Just thinking...