According to history books, the ability to express oneself in writing first emerged about 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia (roughly present-day Iraq). As we humans settled down, began cultivating the land, and began trading with one another and collecting taxes, a system was needed to keep records of supplies of grain and other goods in order. The solution consisted of a series of crumbs, painstakingly flattened with a sharp stick onto clay tablets, various types of characters from which the first written language eventually developed.
But after analyzing more than 260 objects from the Paleolithic period, mostly from the Swabian Alb in southwest Germany, German researchers now believe that the art of expressing oneself in writing is actually tens of thousands of years older. That a kind of original variant of the first written language arose when the first people came to Europe around 40,000 years ago.
– These characters can be seen as precursors to a written language, says one of the researchers behind the new study, linguist Christian Bentz from Saarland University, in a commentary.
The starting point has were the dots and lines that our ancestors carved into mammoth bones and other materials, signs that seem completely incomprehensible to us mere mortals. For example, rows of crossed lines.
Christian Bentz and his colleagues, on the other hand, digitized 3,000 of these characters from 260 objects and then used quantitative linguistics, i.e. the study of language using statistical methods, as well as machine learning algorithms. They then compared the result with the simple original written language that existed centuries before the first written language appeared in Mesopotamia around 5,000 years ago.
To the researchers’ surprise, they then discovered that there were great similarities between the two, both in terms of the degree of repetition and predictability, i.e. the probability of what the next character would be. The two “written languages” were roughly equally complex.
The researchers, reporting their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, do not believe there was a written language 40,000 years ago. However, they state that people back then had the ability to write down thoughts and information. That is, the characters on these objects did not have a purely decorative purpose.
“What we can show is that the entropy, the amount of information, on these objects is comparable to the original written language that emerged much later,” says Christian Bentz.
Read more:
Skeletal finds in South Africa could point to a new human ancestor
The price of our great brains
The prehistoric “fat factory” kept Neanderthals alive
