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Strange symbols carved onto a Stone Age mammoth ivory plate found at a cave in southwest Germany could be the earliest known ...

While historians know roughly where and when humans first began writing, they have many unanswered questions about how and why the practice arose. Now, a new paper suggests that one of the world’s ...

Over 40,000 years ago, our early ancestors were already carving signs into tools and sculptures. According to a new analysis ...

Engravings decorating Stone Age tools and figurines could represent the very first records of information, and thus the dawn ...

Mysterious signs engraved on objects reveal that a form of proto-writing may have been used in Europe 40,000 years ago, tens of thousands of years before the emergence of a full writing system ...

Until now it was thought that writing developed in Mesopotamia around 3,000 BCE, followed by hieroglyphics in Egypt and later in China and Mesoamerica. "The Stone Age sign sequences are an early ...

Statistical analysis reveals ancient bone carvings hold complex information rivaling early Mesopotamian scripts.

More than 40,000 years ago, Ice Age humans were carving repeated patterns of dots, lines, and crosses into tools and small ivory figurines. A new computational study of more than 3,000 of these ...

The discovery of 5,000-year-old linguistic inscriptions predates by 1,400 years the earliest known Chinese writing and matches the age of the oldest known human writing in Mesopotamia. (via ...