How did we learn to write from caveman times to now?

Question

i just thought this, in caveman times, how did humans learn to write letters and words and create communication with words?

As im on this, How did we learn to speak these words?

Answer 1

Sir Isaac Newton wrote, "If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants"

That's a good explanation of how we developed as people.

Here's a way to look at it. In the early 1980s the Apple IIe was top of the line. Mine had 64k of memory, no hard drive, and the floppy disks were just that, five inches square and very bendable. I still remember getting a modem and how I'd tie the only phone line up. Today computer memory is measured in gigabytes, memory sticks easily hold 2 gigs of information, and we use high speed cable. Think of the cell phone. First ones looked like WWII radios, cost big bucks and were hard to work. Compare that to the iphone!

The earliest writing seems to dates back 5500 years. Before that there are examples of carvings that may be about the moon or just decoration.

Writing was at first picture based. You drew what you were writing about. As writing increased, shortcuts developed. You see this today with text messaging. Words are shortened and "BTW" letters stand for phrases.

It then is simple development: better things to write on and with, faster ways to get information about and better ways to store the information.

Ever use a card catalog?

http://www.library.uiuc.edu/rex/instruct...

That's an example of how far we've come in just a few years.

Answer 2

20,000 years ago "Cavemen" left indications of uniformed scratchings on stone, bone, ivory and antler, that they were attempting to mark the lunar cycles...A pre-historic calendar of sorts...

Since then, the earliest form of writing which was left for us to find, as we think of writing, is the Cuneiform writing of the Sumerian civilization, dating to as early as 6500 years ago...

From Cuneiform, came hieroglyphics and the hieratic written languange of Egypt, circa 4000 BCE...

The rest, is history!

Answer 3

Language does not have to have spoken words and most likely started that way.  Facial expressions are now innate(inborn) and that shows that its use is been around for a very long time. Body language communicates without words and most people can read it without having to be taught.  This would have been the beginnings of language long before the cavemen.  Humans like other animals would have had certain sounds for warnings.  Many people don't like to hear loud talk, they are most likely still hearing the danger warning signal in that loud talk. Language would have started with just simple nouns and words would have echoed the sound made by animals or other activities.  The ancient Egyptian word for cat is Mau which is our meow. Verbs would have come later on because they are more of an abstract idea with words such as being I am, you are, he is shown to be oldest/most used in the way that the word changes with each pronoun.  To write a word is even more difficult and would have come last because you add the extra aspect of art and symbolism to whole communication business.

Answer 4

we didn't, just because you see caveman on tv doesn't mean they are real, people are so brainwashed.

Answer 5

There are some paleolithic  pebbles with what look like letters on them, called the Asilian pebbles, but the jury is out on them. They are cave man era.

http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf033/s...

The European Vinca culture (Rhine) has what look like writing on pottery placed in graves, although there's some debate as to wether it's writing or not, it seriously predates anything in the middle East, 8,000 years ago,well before cuneiform.

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/vinca.ht...

We'll only ever get to know about writing on very robust materials, as if they were using any form of paper or hide it would have rotted a long time ago. Sanskrit has this dating problem, as it apparently appears fully formed with no history, and it the surviving Hindu books written in it are copies of the older books that rotted away.

Normally, writing starts off as a crude picture drawn to represent an object, which then get simplified into stylized pictograms, like Chinese and Japanese writing. The oldest ever known pictograms (8,600 years old) are from a Chinese grave, scratched into a piece of tortoiseshell.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2956...

With cuneiform, they converted the pictograms to represent a phonetic (letters representing sounds) alphabet, like 'E' and 'S', instead of whole words , making it a lot simpler to learn. This is the kind of alphabet that English is written in.

As for how did we learn to speak, theres a mutation on a gene called FOX2P that is different in us to chimps, and it has improved our ability to make and understand complex sounds. Also, humans have very good voluntary muscle control of their breathing, unlike most land animals, and it helps to control the noises we make. We also have a descended larynx, which is a feature common to a lot of aquatic mammals, and there have been a few mutations, like the hyoid bone, the enable us to make an extremely complex range of sounds.

Language probably stared of as simple nouns used as warnings, like 'SNAKE!', even chickens have calls that can be shown to mean things like this. Slowly it's changed and become more abstract, but the use of language isn't limited to humans. Dolphins have been shown to speak different dialects from dolphins in other areas (of the same species).