How long did homosapiens exist before they invented writing?
Modern humans are Homo.sapiens.sapiens which acquired our modern form and brain case 250,000 to 350,000 years ago. Homo.sapiens our total bloodline and our species is 750,000 years to 1.2 million depending on how much brain case development one wants to include in the Homo.s line.
Writing systems probably came and went a number of times, beginning as rudimentary recordkeeping or labeling systems, and became more sophisticated as part of accounting systems (y’know, because taxes are inevitable ;^).
The rub is, a lot of text will have been on transitory materials such as leaves. Dravidian texts on large leaves only go back to the Middle Ages, probably copied from earlier versions. Papyrus scrolls have survived to an extent, mostly in Egyptian sands, but they’ve partly crumbled away. The oldest surviving text of a small part of The Odyssey is at Oxford, and I think that one was a mummy wrapping that had been recycled in Roman times. The Oxyrhynchus papyri appear to have been chucked into a trash pit.
More pertinent for this topic, a ship’s manifest on papyrus survived in or near the ruins of one of the Roman Red Sea ports, showing Hermapollon, a large Roman ship, carried about 620 tons of pepper.
The oldest writing that is known about now, but not readable, is found among the European cave paintings.
The Vinca characters (SE Europe) are up to 7300 years old (last ones around 3500 BC) and found inscribed on surviving ceramic bowls and such. Those inscriptions possibly represent a labeling system (”soup” “cheese” ;^), could be the artisan’s initials or signature, etc.
Earliest known fired clay objects are also from Europe and go back about 28K years, but there’s no known writing or even paint on them. Carved stone objects go back as much as 400K years but no apparent writing on them.