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Comment by reissbaker | Hacker News Reader

Agriculture started around 12k years ago. Prior to that, all of humanity lived in hunter-gatherer tribal bands. Why would you need writing, when you could just talk to the person who knew the thing you wanted to learn? Not to mention that prior to the invention of the printing press, writing was very laborious to produce at scale.

Even as recently as the 1800s, nearly 90% of the world was illiterate [1]. We live in a hyper-literate society, so it's almost unimaginable, but it's really how the world worked!

1: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2022/09/reading-writing-glob...

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I think you have to assume that there's kind of an ambiguous continuum between art and writing. Obviously hunter-gatherer bands likely had reasons to communicate with band members, whether by sounds or visual signals. And obviously they made art, and humans being humans, presumably a lot of the art hat some kind of meaning. I think there are uses for using symbols to communicate well before you need ledgers or anything similar. But I don't know exactly where art turns into writing: Even when the world was mostly illiterate, it seems clear than lots of humans had some level of symbol literacy. And in some places that symbol literacy gets so dense you have Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs. And maybe in others you maybe have something similar but less preserved.

> Even when the world was mostly illiterate, it seems clear than lots of humans had some level of symbol literacy.

Interesting - where is that from?

Practically all painting or drawing includes some sort of symbolism. Sometimes it’s so obvious that we don’t recognise it as symbolism (picture of cow = cow), but other things aren’t (spiral = ?).

The Wikipedia article on Rock Art contains a lot of discussion on the meaning of ancient drawings, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_art

More recently, medieval painting has a lot of symbolism modern audiences can no longer “read”.

I read about an American professor that was visiting the various cathedrals in France and started noticing that the stained glass windows were interweaving the parable of the good samaritan with the story of the garden of eden in a fairly consistent manner. He didn't understand why they were doing that until he found records of medieval sermons explaining why they were combining these two stories. It was a symbolic message that would have made sense to medieval peoples, but had been lost over the intervening centuries.

I think it's a trivial observation. For example, it's clear illiterate people in Europe still knew what a cross meant when on a building, there is no doubt about that. There are many more religious symbols that were also well known. Flags and official seals similarly had well known meanings in their own areas, as did various military symbols.

OK, but symbol literacy, at least in this sense, is a long way from literacy in a language having the grammar of the spoken language of these people (or a grammar equally as expressive, as we see, for example, in the case of scholars who read and wrote in Latin while conversing in the vernacular of their time and place.)

There is reasonably strong evidence that writing actually evolved out of accounting. These early agricultural city-states needed to track the seasonal collection of harvests from the farmers, and continual distribution of food back to everyone.

What started as a ad-hoc system of tellies, eventually evolved into a fully-fledged writing system. And once the accountants had a functioning writing system, it would have been obviously useful, and moved into other parts of society. Tax records, laws, contracts, long-distance messages, recording history.

Art was probably one of the last places in society actually take advantage of this new writing technology.

Hunter-gatherer societies didn't develop writing because they didn't need accountants.

Or... we've found the most evidence of writing connected to an activity that would have naturally made the most effort to ensure it's preservation.

Thing is, we have plenty of evidence of writing connected to other activities from later periods.

As for the effort, the most would be expanded on preserving monumental projects glorifying the rulers etc. But, again, in the historical record, this shows up later than accounting records.

> prior to the invention of the printing press, writing was very laborious to produce at scale.

Imagine having to engrave anything you write in clay, stone, wood, etc. One reason runic alphabets are shaped that way is because it's easier to carve in straight lines (iirc).

How many comments would there be on a HN page if that was required?

I agree runes like Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Irish were straight lines for the most part since they were easy to make. Irish Ogrham runes were just basic lines literally just lines. Norse Futhark was more complex but still all angles.

Ancient Sumerians in modern Iraq area used cuneiform. The cut tip of a reed was used to make marks in in wet clay which was quite a rapid way to write. There are even old practice tablets with scribblings of children in school learning to write.

The reason they still exist is fire. A wood building burned at some point and the fire caused the clay tablets to harden like in a kiln preserving them.

In modern Inda/Pakistan region Harappan culture also used clay Indus script but it was more elaborate and not as "wordy". It seems mainly clay tags to attach to goods to identify them.

The earliest surviving evidence of writing was not baked in antiquity, just dried clay. Some have been baked in the 19th century for preservation. Some of the clay tablets have indeed survived presumably due to fires that burned the building in which they were stored - there is even some evidence of unsent letters found in ruins with signs of burning.

But the reason we have very ancient evidence of writing is categorically not because they were baked in ancient times.

Those are not the only options, though. Papyrus is very ancient tech, as are palm leaves and similar. Parchment is more recent, but still predates the runic alphabets by many centuries. Some trees have bark soft enough to write on a sharp stylus - birch was notably used for that purpose. Then you have wax tablets etc.

The problem is that many of these options are expensive in a pre-industrial society. In places where the writing material was cheap and readily available, and where writing was socially beneficial, you see much more "mundane" writing show up - e.g. in the Novgorod merchant republic, birch bark was apparently cheap enough for kids to doodle on (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim).

I don’t believe that agriculture only started then. It’s just the earliest evidence we have. Everything always gets pushed earlier

Yeah, you can do a lot of agriculture just by planting some plants and comming back later which would have looked basically the same as hunter gathering to archeologists. Similar stuff is done to this day for cannabis https://www.vice.com/en/article/meet-the-gangster-free-weed-...

It doesn't actually look the same to archaeologists. One of the things we'll do is look for subtle changes in seed morphology as a sign of domestication. There are also methods of seeing what types of plants are growing in a region, which changes when humans begin selectively cultivating certain plants. We can also get a rough estimate of how many people were in an area and in what seasons.

It's not "why do you need writing?", it's "how do you discover writing?". Once it's discovered the new purposes will appear pronto.

Majority of this world is still not literate, just be happy to be there

That is plainly incorrect - even in the least literate areas of the world, which are mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa at this point, literacy rates are over 50%. Taken in aggregate, only 1 in 8 people worldwide is illiterate.

"nearly 90% of the world was illiterate" I've never believed statistics like this. Humans have a remarkable ability to grasp symbols.

Try to learn a script you don't know without any kind of instruction whatsoever. Maybe you'd have some chance with the Latin alphabet, but most writing systems are more complex than it, some far more complex. I would bet no one could learn Chinese writing for example without instruction, even if they knew spoken Mandarin to perfection.

Cultivation began around 20kya.

Enter the hypothetical ice age civilization that was destroyed 13k years ago in a global cataclysm.

Enter the hypothetical tea kettle in orbit around the sun

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