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Comment by asdff | Hacker News Reader

Writing seems like it should be far more ancient than we ought to assume. You make some tally marks to count something, show someone else how to read your tallys, now you have a proto writing system. All you need is to iterate more symbols describing more things to scale it out, and this sort of thing seems like it would snowball over time and generations.

Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing systems not just in our species either. I guess most species aren't in situations where storing information like this offers much of a selective advantage. Maybe you can count an animal scent marking out its territory as a sort of proto writing system; it is only somewhat different than the plat map in your city hall.

EDIT: Apparently neanderthals are thought to have used tally marks... (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-did-neanderth...)

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We can presume with near certainty that there are vast quantities of lost artifacts from lost civilizations of early humans that were crafted from organic matter that have just deteriorated to dust. We say "Stone Age" only because stone artifacts are the only to survive. You can assume there were orders of magnitude more and more sophisticated artifacts and art works made from wood or mud or skins that are just gone forever. It's also entirely possible some of those artifacts contained something akin to written language but whatever it was is long gone.

I think writing was forced more by demand than the ability to do. Before the first city states which needed laws, taxes, debts, etc to be recorded, people just did not need to write detailed information. Like most technology it could have been invented earlier, but the need just wasn't there. Simple oral story telling and a few written symbols was good enough.

The book The Language Puzzle delves into this a bit - even our closest genetic primate cousins appear to lack the physical adaptations in both brain and voice box/mouth to develop verbal language and written language is a step farther, other species show some signs like cetaceans and elephants. There’s a bit of speculation in there that advanced hand tools and language may have been coincident (from archaeological evidence with close time stamps) and that still took a very long time.

they have found tally markers on bones and other objects like that, so yeah you would be correct, i guess it really comes down to what "writing" is i guess?

My first thought was that I'd argue that tally marks are "counting" not "writing"

...but...

if "writing" is the act of conveying ideas through markings then... I guess it is kinda writing.

We get caught up with English being so removed from the underlying symbology, but the older you get in terms of language development the more it becomes a sort of "symbol that looks like ripples = water" sort of language, and the number system that goes along with that is often some form of tally marking that just happens to be in some other shape. A lot of east asian languages are still like this, basically stylized pictographs.

And once it gets invented it snowballs as it is shared. How old were we when we learned to tally mark? 4-5 years old in the playground sandbox maybe? I remember thinking how great it was you slashed for 5 to just count blocks of 5 tallys. But its one thing to learn it from others and understand it. Another thing to come up with the system entirely. No one in the playground was probably clever enough to do that yet. We could learn but few could probably be the doers.

Probably happened on wood, which wasn’t preserved

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