[adrian_b]

This does not seem very likely, because earlier than this people did not really need a writing system. More precisely, they had no reason to believe that a writing system would be useful, so there was no pressure to invent one.

In Mesopotamia we can see the evolution over many hundreds of years and even a few millennia from an accounting system that used a few symbols for the things that were recorded, to a full fledged writing system that was able to record any spoken sentence.

Before the societies of Mesopotamia and Egypt, which required a complex management of the available resources, there was no need for accounting with written records for great quantities of varied goods.

It is likely that for tens of thousands of years people have been able to make drawings that recorded useful things, like maps, and they probably have used some sets of symbols for various important things, like kinds of humans, kinds of animals, kinds of plants and so on.

Nevertheless, it is very unlikely that any such set of symbols used in the distant past has ever been able to record any complete sentence spoken in their language, with all the grammatical markers that do not have a concrete meaning.

[shakna]

The Mayans were writing with knotted rope around 1900BCE, so I would very much say it wouldn't be beyond possibility. Most of the early use was for tracking the seasons for religious rites - a pressure for developing writing that would exist across most early cultures.

[WalterBright]

I wonder about the knotted rope. How much information could it contain? Not very much. It's hard to imagine it being very useful.

[shakna]

We haven't altogether decoded them, so the answer to that is up in the air. However it does appear to use something akin to decimal for numbers, but the encodings use numbered knots, colours, and positioning within a larger weave. Around 60k variations have been found. However, there can also be some thousands of braids within larger weaves.

The depth of the information contained can be debated, but as the Spanish utilised the related quipu following their invasion, for their own record keeping needs, it is "of use". (The Spanish used those for tracking crop growth, timelines, deliveries, royal decrees, family trees, and spread of illnesses in remote areas. They're also still used in some religious sects today.)

[r14c]

Not sure which technology OP is talking about, but quipu at least are can store information like census records and dates. Similar concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu

[r14c]

Could you give more info about this tech? I can't find any reference to Maya knot writing.

[mistercheph]

How do you know so much about the motivations of people that have been dead for tens of thousands of years? Maybe you can speak to the dead?

[adrian_b]

The people from fifty thousand years ago do not differ in any essential way from the people of today, except in the knowledge and in the set of skills that they were taught.

Most human societies that have not seen a writing system at other people have never invented any writing system.

All those that are likely to have invented writing independently (though for some of them it is not certain that they have not seen the writing used by others) have invented writing systems in contexts similar to those of Mesopotamia and Egypt, i.e. in a settled agricultural society where cooperation was required at a large scale and management and accounting of resources was necessary.

[Amezarak]

I get what you're saying, but I also think it's hard to overstate how different ancient cultures and experiences made people.

[asyx]

That’s a cultural difference though. It’s like when people believe that you’re going to be declared a witch and burned at the stake if you time travelled to the past and talked about iPhones. Just like in any culture today, they’d just assume you’re nuts, laugh and move on.

However, people generally underestimate how culture differs. The idea of belonging to a certain group was vital in the Middle Ages. And that’s something modern people would probably not put much thought in if time travel was possible.

Single digit thousands of years is a drop in the bucket for evolution. The people back then were largely the same as they are now. They just lived in different cultures. Modern innovations are all motivated by a need. Some form of pressure to come up with a solution. Pre civilization societies just don’t have a need. It’s accounting and management of a large population that requires some form of book keeping and written records. There is no reason to believe, without need and cultural precedence, that writing would have been invented by societies in earlier stages.

In the same way classical physics isn’t wrong about the world compared to modern physics, calling this the first writing system is just in the context of our current understanding of the world of the past. We can be pedantic about the details but going by our current understanding, this is what makes sense. This understanding might change but it’s is needlessly pedantic, especially in a field like this that is less „cold hard truth“-ish compared to physics.

[mistercheph]

I don't think you've thought seriously about what writing "is useful for" or why someone might start to write, and you can't just pick a rationale and impose it ad-hoc on the past and wave a flag saying humans are unchanged. Sure, in some ways,, relevance?

We haven't ever observed the invention of a writing system in the absence of cultural contact with written language, so we actually have no basis in evidence for the motivations that bring such a thing about, we just have speculations based on preconceived notions about why people might use writing, which is fine, but don't pretend like it isn't blindly opining on why you think someone would've invented or used a writing system

[biorach]

Their point is that hunter-gatherers or subsistence farmers have no use for a writing system. A complex urban society does.

[WalterBright]

If you're a nomadic hunter-gatherer tribe, you're not going to carry around clay tablets that say "Happy Birthday, love Gramma" on them.