#proto-writing

[ancientstuff]

20,000-year-old cave painting 'dots' are the earliest written language, study claims. But not everyone agrees.

Stone Age dots, lines and Y-shaped marks might represent a type of proto-writing created by hunter-gatherers who lived in Europe at least 20

Lots of articles about this. It's an interesting idea, but it really needs a lot more research before it can be 'proven'. Hint: it can never be proven, but the argument for it could be made stronger (or weaker).

[cyphorical]

A Total Amateur May Have Just Rewritten Human History With Bombshell Discovery

Ben Bacon is "effectively a person off the street," but he and his academic co-authors think they've found the earliest writing in human history.

“...the earliest writing in human history [...] in prehistoric cave paintings in Europe [...] made by our species between roughly 15,000 and 40,000 years ago...” “Ben Bacon, a furniture conservator based in London, U.K. [...] has unveiled what he believes is ‘the first known writing in the history of Homo sapiens,’ in the form of a prehistoric lunar calendar...” “We do not want to press the controversial (and in many senses, semantic) question of whether writing was a Paleolithic invention; perhaps it is best described as a proto-writing system...” "...in the form of a phenological/meteorological calendar. It implies that a form of writing existed tens of thousands of years before the earliest Sumerian writing system."

[possessivesuffix]

On The Origin Of Writing - Part Two

Proto-writing: Kaidā, Adinkra and Ersu Shaba

Some not-quite-writing systems you probably didn't know about before.

[linguisticalities]

These Hunter-Gatherers Developed A System Of Written Signs Thousands Of Years Before Writing Was Invented

[battybriefs]

Doing my night time insomnia routine of hitting the Wikipedia random button and following the interesting links until I pass out.

Tonight I'm reading about proto-writing / cuniform.

I love how the Sumerians were like "this symbol looks like a little fish, so it means fish", and "this little symbol looks like a house so it means habitation."

And at some point the Sumarians were like, "Ok, now I need a cuniform for the city of Nineveh" and they're just like "Ok, hear me out. What about... fish house?"

I'm also in love with the Sumerian cuniform for head. Little dude is like -___-

[timespanner]

Threads That Speak: How The Inca Used Strings to Communicate | National Geographic

One of the great mysteries of ancient Peru is that the Inca did not have a system of writing, but communicated with a system of strings tied with knots.

Quipus are made of a cotton or wool strings hanging from a main cord. The knots on the strings convey meaning through their location, direction, and type. Researchers already have a basic understanding of the numerical system incorporated in the quipus, where knots represent numbers. The hope is to move beyond mathematical operations to understanding non-numerical words or phrases from the agricultural product inventories. It is a whole new body of data to add to the Quipu Database Project and to understanding this interesting form of communication.