History of communication
The oldest known symbols created for communication were cave paintings, a form of rock art, dating to the Upper Paleolithic age.
[2] These paintings contained increasing amounts of information: people may have created the first calendar as far back as 15,000 years ago.
[5] It is possible that Homo sapiens (humans) of that time used some other forms of communication, often for mnemonic purposes - specially arranged stones, symbols carved in wood or earth, quipu-like rocks, tattoos, but little other than the most durable carved stones has survived to modern times and we can only speculate about their existence based on our observation of still existing 'hunter-gatherer' cultures such as those of Africa or Oceania.
[6] A pictogram (pictograph) is a symbol representing a concept, object, activity, place or event by illustration.
[7] They were the basis of cuneiform[8] and hieroglyphs and began to develop into logographic writing systems around 5000 BCE.
For example, an eye with a tear means 'sadness' in Native American ideograms in California, as it does for the Aztecs, the early Chinese and the Egyptians.
The oldest-known forms of writing were primarily logographic in nature, based on pictographic and ideographic elements.
The first writing system is generally believed to have been invented in prehistoric Sumer and developed by the late 4th millennium BCE into cuneiform.
By the end of the 4th millennium BCE, this had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using a round shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers.
By the 26th century; BCE, this script had been adapted to another Mesopotamian language, Akkadian, and from that to others such as Hurrian, and Hittite.
[9] The pre-Columbian writing systems of the Americas, including Olmec and Mayan, are also generally believed to have had independent origins.
These glyphs were used as pronunciation guides for logograms, to write grammatical inflections, and, later, to transcribe loan words and foreign names.
In the Middle Bronze Age an apparently "alphabetic" system is thought by some to have been developed in central Egypt around 1700 BCE for or by Semitic workers, but we cannot read these early writings and their exact nature remains open to interpretation.
Over the next five centuries this Semitic "alphabet" (really a syllabary like Phoenician writing) seems to have spread north.
[14] In its natural form, oral communication was, and has continued to be, one of the best ways for humans to spread their message, history, and traditions to the world.
