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Earliest "Writing" On 60,000-Year-Old Eggshells
New Scientist reports on research published in PNAS (abstract here) about what may be the earliest writing yet discovered, on eggshells dated to 60,000 years ago. "Since 1999, Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux, France, and his colleagues have uncovered 270 fragments of shell at the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape, South Africa. They show the same symbols are used over and over again, and the team say there are signs that the symbols evolved over 5,000 years. This long-term repetition is a hallmark of symbolic communication and a sign of modern human thinking, say the team. [Another researcher is quoted:] 'Judging from what we know about the evolution of art all over the world, there may have been many [written language] traditions that were born, lasted for some time, and then vanished. This may be one of them, most probably not the first and certainly not the last.'"
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The writing says
Best Before: Birth of Christ
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"Ooga Booga Farms"
In 60,000 years we've progressed from scratching symbols on eggshells and shitting in caves to producing electronic television shows like "Jersey Shore" and "The Hills." How far we've come.
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Easter eggs!
I wish in articles like these they presented more of the source images, and in higher resolution. The small sample they provide is beautiful, but to the layman appears as a kind of meandering, simple decoration. Of course the claims are limited: communication via graphic art is distinct from communication via modern written languages.
It's interesting to imagine the first lonely human writers at the dawn of written language - how many wrote things only they themselves could understand, before coincidence formed the first community of proto-literate people? How much of this early writing was just the smooth flow of art - abstract or representational - into more concrete meanings relevant to the every day lives even of the illterate?
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It probably says something like, My Eggs, Hands Off.
Did it make any more sense than current txt spk?
Take Nobody's Word For It.
Kilroy will be here
... Easter eggs. What's the big deal?
I hope no one was walking on those eggshells.
Turns out it was a shopping list. First item on the list? Eggs.
It said "we chuck spears, yo".
The PNAS jokes practically write themselves!
There are several proto-writings, such as the Vinca script which are fascinating, but also hotly debated.
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Is misread this into something along the lines of, "Beware of Chuck Norris"
They show the same symbols are used over and over again, and the team say there are signs that the symbols evolved over 5,000 years. This long-term repetition is a hallmark of symbolic communication and a sign of modern human thinking, say the team.
Indeed, this is quite true and the tradition continues. It's hard to imagine our forebears scratching symbols in eggshell and that one day it would lead to us scratching symbols in kornshell. The shells then were quite fragile, barely able to withstand an errant pointer. A misplaced hash would lead to a shell escape. And don't even get me started on bash. When the ancients were using eggshell, there were many competing mediums. Deer horns and bits of pottery, jade, flecks of obsidian -- they were all prettier and easier to work with. Today it's the same -- there's ruby and perl and a host of others -- but kornshell, and its ancestor eggshell, will always have a place in my heart,
I have examined the shells, and have been able to decipher the images. It reads...
VERY FIRST POST.
F1RST SKR4TCH!
The pink one says "ZOMG, Z3BR4Z!"
Probably: boil egg in water for 10 mins.
I'm assuming it's chicken eggs but perhaps they were eating some other egg (duck, turtle, etc) back then?
I wouldn't be surprised if they were warning each other of Chuck Norris 60,000 years ago.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
when the first paleolithic software writer retired and the sandstone media deteriorated. Given the evidence, the original program probably had something to do with viewing naked women. More research into naked women is continuing.
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In other news, a preserved skeleton of a a giant prehistoric rabbit-like creature was found in the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape, South Africa.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
Ok, I understand they can carbondate the shells.
However, how did they date the markings?
They may be 300 yrs old.
Especially considering bushmen were still carving shells recently.
http://www.stolk.org/tlctc
...the handwriting is on the inside of the shells.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
this can't be true man was made by good only a few thousand years ago
We need some better pics.
From home it looks now, my best bet is that it's just an ornament of some sort.
This looks somewhat better than the pics in the summary link. (Or have I not found the good ones?)
By an ancient Einstein, I mean someone who develops as significant piece of technology in a single generation. Like fossils in evolutions, this could be so fast that it was not saved in the archeologic record. Two Examples:
Egyptian pyramids went for stacked sand-walled mastabas to full-blown monsters in less than a century. This was attributed to creativity of Imhotep. (also credited with inventing columns in architecture).
The idea of purely phonetic alphabet seen to arise instantly in the archeological record in Ugarit 3400 years ago. It was adapted to Phonecia, Greece, Isreal, Rome etc. Most previous writing systems had combination of pure ideographs and phonetic syllables- ideographs borrowed because they sound like other works (like people do in charades).
Or for DVD's for that matter
"Thag! We finally managed to climb to the great bird nest in level 3 peak. There was a mini-game! Look at the writing on this egg!"
"Let me see that..."
[You are in a clearing. A small cabin sits to the east. A dark forest is to the north. Impenetrable bushes are to the south and west. Choose the blue egg to go east. Choose the red egg to go north.]
"Oooh...Dark forest sounds cool. Open the red egg!"
[It is dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.]
Both cavemen frown.
"Not very original. This just happened to Grok yesterday."
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clearly, by evidence of the broken eggshells, we're talking about a primitive IRC eggdrop
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggdrop
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"Don't fear, closed-minded scientists- I saw the big bang, and God wasn't there. No need to worry." :>
Funny how the "open minded" snap shut when you tell them the dataset resides in the Bible...won't even look. Discredited source, though they have no answers.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
Looks like there's an extra 0 in both the headline and summary.
Grade A Large
Hello World
They are most likely mandated 'best before' dates.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
why do you think there's only "fragments" left? Chuck Norris was there .
"This may be one of [the writing traditions], most probably not the first and certainly not the last."
I appreciate the "probably" on this being the first, but certainly not the last? Well I think it's a little presumptuous to assert that! I wouldn't be surprised if in ten years this scientist is eating crow because it turns out this was the last form of writing!
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>The eggshells were probably used as containers, and the markings may have indicated either the shells' contents or their owner.
Obi-Wan: "I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were sudden
Considering that, 60,000 years ago, humans simply did not live in large groups, I have a hard time believing that writing would have been invented. Writing, initially, required pretty much a dedicated group of scribes (or possibly, in China, some sort of priestly class). Writing seems to have evolved in every place it was developed as a response to the needs of a large urbanized society.
Note that hunter-gatherer groups have often used symbols (like petroglyphs and pictograms), but these are not writing systems. I am extremely dubious of these claims.
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Perhaps these symbols were still far from forming a structured script. Still, from the article it seems that they were used for communication, which is the main goal of writing. The reason why this is amazing is clear when you put it into the context of humankind 60.000 years later: we STILL have tribes that have no concept of writing, and in some countries analphabetism is affecting large swaths of the population.
That reminds me of Civilization, when you "find Writing in scrolls of ancient wisdom". Who knows how much of such "ancient wisdom" was lost and then re-developed only to be lost again, during these past tens of millennia. In fact, a lot of the engineering and science developed during the Apollo program, with the passing of Wernher von Braun and some of his colleagues, can well be considered lost. Sorry for the digression.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
This was the species before the last cleanup of the Matrix.
This long-term repetition is a hallmark of symbolic communication and a sign of modern human thinking, say the team.
So that explains the constant duplicate Slashdot stories!
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that's nonsense. Progress is real.
Take computing: when I started in the digital world (PDPs) it took hours to do anything useful on a computer. Now it takes hours to do anything useful but we have a lot more pixels.
Would not surprise me, I'm sure independent writing systems popped up all over the place then died out. One example would be Inca khopu knot-tying notation. Woo, that anthropology degree finally came in handy.
577345993
... and as I recall, the results were that hunter-gatherers were better nourished (both in terms of just calories and the various essential nutrients) than earlier farming populations... on average. The trouble was that excursions from the "average" were a lot bigger for the hunter gatherers.. it was quite literally feast or famine. So although the H-G populations got more nutrition over the course of, say, a year, they were also more likely to starve to death during the lean times. Agriculture was, comparatively, a sure thing, which is why most groups took to it. But the move wasn't without cost - for one thing, you ended up having to work a lot harder to be successful at agriculture, as someone pointed out above.
*CRUUUNCH* WTF DUDE!... That was my hunting/gathering thesis paper. Watch where you're walking and what did I say about bringing your club inside the cave!
Ia! Ia! Cthullu ftahgn!
"Only the Conservative Party will Keep The Pound!"
So, you write your shopping list on the old stuff?
Hope you never run out of toilet paper.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
actually the inscription was strangely written in mirror-image and read "HELP! GET ME OUT OF HERE!"
The inscription: Made by a kind of insect or worm that liked the calcium in the shell.
Yes, its essentially a universal writing system for all Chinese speakers from what I understand. There is the caveat that there was an old system for writing that was traditional, and there is now a newer simplified system that requires less symobols etc. From what I understand not everyone knows the old system, so some things that are older may be somewhat unreadable to modern readers.
"Chinese" actually comprises 5 language groups I believe (Mandarin, Cantonese, Han, Wu and something else), and well over 1 million dialects, but a newspaper printed anywhere in mainland China can be read anywhere in mainland China regardless of what languages the reader speaks. Its an incredible feature generally speaking, and I presume has contributed to the overall cohesiveness of the Chinese people throughout history. It does suffer from the fact that to use it you need to memorize thousands of written symbols, rather than just our 26 for the English alphabet. I believe I recall reading that by the time a student is in grade 7, they have memorized around 10,000 Chinese characters.
I know its possible to type in Chinese but I have no idea how its possible to be honest.
Grammar should not be a real obstacle as all Chinese languages have a very simplified grammar from what I understand
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
The only thing I see is vertical segments.
I suppose this is some sort of primitive way to count objects, like an abacus but written on eggshells, since they didn't know paper at this time.
There are a lot of segments, and they probably didn't have an advanced mathematical system to represent large numbers.
How can the searchers deduce it's some undecipherable writing ? This is a mystery for me.
...are belong to us.
I don't know about writing, but it's got to be the earliest example of Easter Eggs, both literal and metaphorical. IMO, they should also win Best Hiding Spot, since it took 60,000 years to find them.
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It is a well documented fact that the San (Bushman) marked individual ostrich eggshell containers as proof of ownership. These were mostly used as water containers and buried in areas where there is no surface water for long periods of time (eg the Kalahari Desert). The San have been doing this for, quite literally, time immemorial and, indeed, do so to this very day. It must also be remembered that the ostrich eggshell is NOT 'fragile'. They could store water for hundreds of years if the opening was sealed with fibre and melted bees-wax. Far longer than any wooden, skin or earthen-ware container would. Also, in a cave deposit, OSTRICH eggshell will outlast pottery, even bone, only stone will survive longer than Ostrich eggshell. So when is a symbol of ownership deemed to be 'writing' or 'art'. Are we to now say these inhabitants weren't illiterate? The Howiesons Poort shelter gives it's name to a specific tradition that corresponds with the European Mesolithic (in South Africa called the Middle Stone Age), which goes back to 80,000 years BP. That's a LONG time ago!
To me that looks like decorative patterns. Like on vases, terracotta or Easter eggs.
But of course that does’t sound as sensationalist...
My guess: The transition is smooth. There is something for every point between our written language and a simple scratch in the ground.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.