The Eleventh Hour of Human Evolution
Imagine we were to compress humanity's existence in this planet into a 24 hour day.
As we observe our evolution we would notice our ancestors beginning to growl, snarl, mumble and finally utter their first words. For the best part of those 24 hours, humans would be communicating verbally and through body language. It would be the natural thing to do. They would speak about what they knew and what mattered to them, their first vocabularies depicting animals, plants, food and some of the sensations they felt in their everyday lives like pain, fear and love.
Then, at 11:07 pm someone in old Mesopotamia would record the first written message in history.
Only 53 minutes short of the end of that very long day would the first words be put on a stone tablet.
Only 145,000 years after humans began communicating with each other orally, would they see the need to leave a written record of their utterances.
And yet, as long as it took to develop, writing is one of the fundamental social and technological advancements that have shaped the history of our world.