Writing was invented independently on at least four different occasions according to historians – in Sumeria, ancient Egypt, China and Central America.
So it would not come as a surprise to discover that it had also been invented elsewhere beforehand and died out as a lost technology. After all, we still cannot replicate the techniques which made Samurai swords or Roman concrete. And other technologies like glass-blowing, central heating and seismography are attested to have been invented, lost and then rediscovered.
I think the Vinča symbols from ancient Serbia (which predate Sumerian cuneiform writing by millennia) are almost definitely an example of writing being invented then forgotten, for example.
This process may actually have occurred repeatedly before writing stuck, as it were, when the Mesopotamians discovered it five thousand years ago and shared the technology with their neighbours. What’s really interesting is when this process began.
Latest research suggests maybe up to 40,000 years ago. At least, there are artifacts covered in symbols dating to that period which have been discovered in caves in the Swabian Jura, in the South of Germany.
Scientists are currently reluctant to describe this as even a proto- or rudimentary form of writing, but instead are calling it symbolic external information storage. Which to me seems like a cautious way to describe writing. They’ve also insisted that they’re not trying to decipher the symbols. But you can bet your ass they are attempting exactly that.
Human history often seems like a very recent and rushed occurrence, and it is when viewed through the scale of the history of the planet (billions of years) or even that of complex life on the planet (many hundreds of millions of years.)
But it’s actually quite long and the perception that for most of it, people who were cognitively and physically similar if not identical to us spent their time sniveling in caves or chasing deer and berries is probably a serious underestimation of their abilities to conceptualise and to communicate.
Homo Sapiens as a species (never mind the other sentient hominids which preceded us) is perhaps 300,000 years old. Increasingly we’re beginning to realise that most of ‘prehistory’ (as it was formerly dismissed) actually contained thinking people who thought stuff and achieved things.
Many of those things are now lost to us of course. And some of those things may have included technologies and behaviours now considered inherent to the human experience, like music, ritual and yes, writing.
The tiny numbers and thin densities of populations predicated against some of these technologies and behaviours being sustained sometimes. That’s inevitable. As mentioned above, a number of technologies and behaviours have been repeatedly invented, as it were.
I predict quite confidently that the coming years will bring further archeological discoveries which will start to reinforce the idea that human history didn’t suddenly begin when the Mesopotamians decided to start writing down their grain quotas, but in fact stretches much further back than we might previously have considered.
