Around 40,000 years ago, Paleolithic people inscribed bone with symbols that appear to be part of some sort of writing system ...

New evidence published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates humans experimented with symbolic writing as much as 40,000 years ago. If tru ...

For a long time, anthropologists believed that a written language was a hallmark of a society being complex or 'advanced.' A new study on precolonial Mesoamerican societies shows that you can have a ...

The symbols, discovered on 40,000-year-old artifacts in caves in southwest Germany, may have been a precursor to the first written language ...

Learn how researchers analyzed 3,000 Paleolithic symbols to uncover structured information comparable to early writing systems.

The Indus Valley civilization was one of the most advanced in the world for over 500 years. More than 1000 settlements sprawled across 250,000 square miles of what is now Pakistan and northwest India ...

Russell has a PhD in the history of medicine, violence, and colonialism. His research has explored topics including ethics, science governance, and medical involvement in violent contexts. Russell has ...

You may not be surprised to know that some languages don't use the English alphabet in their writing systems. These languages possess their own names and special writing characters, so unfamiliar and ...

The cuneiform sign for "head" evolved over more than 2,000 years from the pictorial sign on the left to the much abstracted sign on the right. Source: Public Domain/Wikipedia Most of the earliest ...