Writing seems like it should be far more ancient than we ought to assume. You make some tally marks to count something, show someone else how to read your tallys, now you have a proto writing system. All you need is to iterate more symbols describing more things to scale it out, and this sort of thing seems like it would snowball over time and generations.

Seems like there ought to be countless ancient proto writing systems not just in our species either. I guess most species aren't in situations where storing information like this offers much of a selective advantage. Maybe you can count an animal scent marking out its territory as a sort of proto writing system; it is only somewhat different than the plat map in your city hall.

EDIT: Apparently neanderthals are thought to have used tally marks... (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-did-neanderth...)

The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years.

Let that sink in!

It is extraordinary to me that they don't get as much clout as they deserve for maintaining human civilization for so long. They literally evolved cryptologically sound techniques for maintaining their history - through fires, floods, calamity and Mother Nature.

We can't even keep our stories straight in the modern era for longer than 8 months.

one of those mind-boggling timeline comparisons I sometimes think about is Cleopatra and the Pyramids. The Giza pyramids were built around ~2600 years _before_ Cleopatra. And she's about 2000 years removed from us today.

So to think that Egyptians and Romans in Cleopatra's era went to visit the Pyramids as a kind of tourist thing from a civilization 2 millennia removed from them is quite astounding.

I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.

Not sure what is mind boggling. The homo sapiens exists in the _current_ form ( physiologically and brain size, etc ) since at least 250k years. about 50k year ago abstract art was already in vogue.

nitpicking: Sumerians were the oldest civilization to have been found using cuneiform or scripted writing. The actual civilization to have truly invented writing is not known.