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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.'"
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Or "I came first" signed by a chicken
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For the earliest forms of "writing" I suspect there were no "lonely" writers. The earliest forms likely being one step away from pictures, if they simply explain it to the other members of their group then it's pure memorization. Some languages (e.g. Chinese) are still like this, with specific symbols representing a word or concept instead of representing sounds or syllables. The written form of Chinese is mostly the same across the country, while the spoken language differs; the symbols have nothing to do with the pronunciation, they simply express the concept.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
Wrong wrong wrong, it's the prehistoric form of 'best before' date written in an ancient numeral system (similiar to roman numerals).
Turns out it was a shopping list. First item on the list? Eggs.
Unfortunately, they can't; early humans had established a 70,000-year copyright period. And their DMCA takedown notices come by club and bone-tipped arrow.
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.
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
The written form of Chinese is mostly the same across the country, while the spoken language differs; the symbols have nothing to do with the pronunciation, they simply express the concept.
Does this means that people that can't talk to each other can write instead? Convenient then, no need to learn multiple languages.
Yes - actually, funny anecdotal story about things like that. A friend of mine went and travelled the world and he said one of the most interesting quirks about China is that everyone knows the symbols, but not the words.
So - when you are in lets say Germany, and you are looking for a Coffee shop, and you ask the person next to you - and they speak German not English, but you don't know the German word for Coffee. You might use words like Café, and so on and so forth, speaking to the person using different words to get your meaning across.
In China, whenever someone comes across a word they don't know (and it happens quite frequently) - they hold out their hand, and use the index finger of their opposite hand to draw out the symbol of the word you are looking for. This works so well because their symbols mean the words instead of the sounds.
why do you think there's only "fragments" left? Chuck Norris was there .
The rooster came first. Then left, not realizing what he had started. Said he'd call, but never did...prehistoric bastard!
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.
... 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.