[TonyinLA]

If a written language is discovered on 4,400 year old artifacts, that proves the written language must have pre-dated the artifact since the language didn’t arise overnight.

How many centuries/generations to develop a written language from spoken? Is it possible written language/alphabet is thousands of years older? Aren’t we getting close to the Ice Age here?

[Verginius Rufus]

A long time ago, maybe in the 1970s, there was an article in Scientific American arguing that the early cuneiform characters developed out of various small objects used to symbolize various things in trade (a sheep, a goat, etc.). Traders would wrap a bunch of these items in a clay envelope and make notations on the exterior. Eventually they figured out they didn't need to use the tokens--just marks on a clay tablet would convey the information. This happened over thousands of years. The earliest "writing" in Mesopotamia is quite a bit different from the fully-developed cuneiform characters.