When was writing initially invented? Though anthropologists and archaeologists tend to accept that the oldest written word appeared around 5,000 years ago, a new paper published in the Cambridge Archaeology Journal pushes this date back by about 15,000 years.
According to the paper, Ice Age individuals scored and painted strange symbols, including dots, slashes and asterisks, on rock surfaces inside and outside of caves and across portable items such as sticks and stones, to record the seasonal activities of their favorite animals. If these findings stand up under scrutiny, it may mean that our ancient ancestors were much more advanced than previously appreciated.
“The ability to assign abstract signs to phenomena in the world […] to record past events and predict future events was a profound intellectual achievement,” the researchers posit in their paper.
