"...Created the World’s First Writing System" that we know of. They used burned clay, which lasts forever. I am sure there have been writing systems before, they just rotted away.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
We can follow the development of the Sumerian writing system, so we know it didn't derive from an older source.
While nobody can prove there wasn't some civilization that had writing prior to Sumer (can't prove a negative), it stretches the imagination to think that a civilization ONLY ever wrote on perishable media and not on, say, pottery or building walls. Then died out without transmitting their invention to successor civilizations, all of which we can account for their development of writing.
Also, what perishable media? The invention of papyrus was contemporary with Sumer's clay tablets.
Yes, there must have been a long pre-history of writing proper, like, leaving marks on trees or soil as a guide, a warning, etc. But it takes a civilization to start writing on a scale comparable to that of the Sumerians, and such a civilization cannot be lost to time so completely as to leave behind some evidence if its writing - especially given that they would likely use different media, including clay and stone.
It depends on the material. Incas uses knots for record keeping. Those are not as durable as burned clay. In our current global civilization with advanced computing tech, magnetic tapes, cdroms, and hard drives won't last very long. Maybe SSDs have greater durability, but they will also require computing tech to dicipher. I do not think the existence of surviving writing materials is a strong argument for evidence of civilization, and speaks more to the limitations of the technology.
Leaving marks on trees and such is not writing. It is not the transcription of spoken language. We have examples of this kind of symbol-placement on ancient cave art stretching far back into the ice age. It is not considered writing.
Written language is rarely just a transcription. It usually has a number of distinct differences in both lexicon and syntax. There are languages that are only written.
Art is not writing, true. Distinct symbols and syntax are required for writing. But it need not be transcription of anything spoken.
Well, now imagine a mark on a boulder that means ‘danger’ (left there because, say, a tiger lives nearby). Same thing. (And it would not be unreasonable to suspect that that’s how writing began.)
Yes writing systems evolved from earlier symbols used to indicate general concepts without a linguistic context. And those symbols go far back into the ice age -- we see such symbols on the walls of cave paintings in Europe, for example. In the case of Sumer, we certainly know that the writing system derived from accounting symbols for livestock and grain and such.
But going from simple context-free symbols to transcribing spoken language or thought with grammar and structure is a conceptual leap worth tracking.
VW decided to decentralize development, especially software. This is true for the Chinese market, which is very important to VW. Germans like knobs, Chinese like playfull interfaces with gadgets.
Yes, that is true. Maybe they want to do something similar in the US? Where they have some subsidiary doing largely independent development for more region specific models?
Google Drive. It doesn't fullfill the "local" criteria, but it works for us (small engineering firm). We synchronize our local file server with GD nighly and use it only for searching. Google is just good when it comes to search.
I lately had an idea: Why did the industrial revolution start in the UK? Coal mining was probably a factor. But why in the UK? Coal deposits are abundant in other places as well. But the UK has cold, rainy winters. Coal is good for heating, not only for industrial purposes, like smelting metal. Trees have mostly been cut down by that time. I think they used them for ship building. So if you have the coal mining already there, the other steps are more likely to happen.
