ABSTRACT
Even though our species, Homo sapiens, arose roughly 150-180 thousand years ago, writing-which is to say, the practice of rendering linguistic messages as graphic markings-did not emerge until roughly 5,400 years ago. Around that time, ancient scribes in Mesopotamia invented the very first forms of writing, which were highly pictorial in nature. Egyptian hieroglyphs, for example, consisted largely of schematic drawings of animals, tools, body parts, and other objects. These signs had the advantage of being easy to interpret, but they suffered from two serious shortcomings: They were time-consuming to produce, and they were unable to capture abstract concepts like freedom, victory, or religion. Due to these limitations, the original pictorial approach gradually gave way to more efficient systems that employed simplified, conventionalized symbols to represent speech sounds rather than meanings. Still, the shapes of some of these symbols were borrowed from hieroglyphs, and as a result many of the letters that we routinely use today in our Roman alphabet derive from drawings that date back thousands of years. For example, as shown in Figure 8.1, the capital letter A is an inverted ox head-the end point of a long period of cultural evolution that began with cave paintings and progressed through multiple stages of stylization and rotation (Dehaene, 2009).
