neologist wrote:
As far as the development of language, when did humans first begin to record history? Wasn't it about the same time for all ethnic/national groups? As far as I can recall, and you may correct me on this, it is variously believed to be about 5000 years ago.
About the same time as the story of Babel.
More like 6,000 for the Sumerians, but that's just for the tablets that survived. If recording history includes depicting a hunt or marking the lunar cycle, then it goes much further back.
http://www.tufts.edu/as/wright_center/cosmic_evolution/docs/text/text_cult_5.html
Credit for being the first to write texts usually goes to the Sumerians, those residents of a flat plain bordering the Persian Gulf in what was once called Mesopotamia Nearly 6000 years ago, this ancient civilization had created an intricate system of numerals, pictures, and abstract cuneiform symbols. Thousands of baked (hence durable) clay tablets have now been unearthed and each shows that a stylus of wood or bone was used to inscribe a variety of characters. Estimates of the Sumerians' basic vocabulary infer no fewer than 400 separate signs, each denoting a word or syllable. Animals such as the fish and wolf, as well as equipment such as the chariot and the sledge, are clearly depicted, but most Sumerian texts remain largely undeciphered. Because they display more than just pictures, the messages on these tablets already represent a reasonably advanced stage in the evolution of writing. Earlier civilizations perhaps responsible for inventing some of the Sumer symbols probably wrote exclusively on papyrus or wood that decayed long ago. Suggestively, modern computer studies that compare shared linguistic roots of known languages and likely rates of divergence among them (much like the biologist's tree of life) have recently revealed that the Hittite spoken language?-the forerunner of Indo-European languages including English and all the Germanic, Slavic, and Romance languages?-might well have been common among the Neolithic farmers of present-day Turkey as long ago as 9000 years........
.........Artifacts made by early humans provide more clues to the cognitive-able and manual-skill prerequisites for such advanced communications as speaking and writing. Excavations of caves, mostly in southern Europe, have revealed a wealth of small statues and bones having distinctive markings or etchings. Predating the most famous and beautiful of the ice-age art depicting buffalos and horses on cave walls?-the ~25,000 year old expertly rendered lifelike paintings at Lascaux and Chauvet in France?-the oldest of these carvings date back ~50,000 years, including a few stone statuettes displaying symbolic functions of some kind ........
......Science: Statue and bone markings might also reflect the origin of ancient science. Some of the etchings of ~40,000 years ago seem to correlate with the periodic lunar cycle depicting phases of the Moon?-perhaps among the first attempts to keep track of the seasons. Engravings of this sort, as well as large murals on the walls of caves, suggest that people of the late Stone Age were conscious of the seasonal variations in plants and animals. While some archaeologists prefer to interpret these deliberate bone markings as simple arithmetical games, these artifacts may well have been among the very first calendars?-in effect, systematic timekeeping instruments.
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For thousands of years, humans have realized that the best way to dispel mystery is to understand it. 20,000-year-old cave paintings of southern France may be the oldest traces of early magico-religious ceremonies in Earth's dim recesses. These cave-wall images seem to depict rites in which elaborate myths perhaps linked the hunting men and the animals they killed.
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