If modern human existed for hundreds of thousands years why was writing invented only some 7000-9000 years ago?

Question

Linguistic studies indicate that human languages were not that different from modern languages 6000 and 7000 years ago. They had distinguishable sounds, vowels, consonants, syllables, roots and stems and so on.

Biology also indicates that mental abilities of humans changed little over at least the last 100000 years.

I wonder why no form of writing ever emerged before some 7000-9000 years ago, even logographic, symbolic, runic or any other kind?

I also wonder why the writing emerged nearly simultaniously in unrelated parts of the world (America, Africa, East Asia). Even if there was distance of some thousands of years between emergence of these writing systems, it still looks quite simultanious compared to the scale of some 100000-200000 years of the history of the modern human.

Why did no form of writing or symbolic expression appear independently in any part of the world, say 15-20 thousand years ago or so?

Answer 1

The concept of writing appears to be something that societies naturally stumble upon when they reach a certain level of stratification and density. In other words, they have to be developed enough to need writing.

In pretty much all known cases it was first used chiefly for accounting, and then evolved to keep track of the accomplishments of kings.

So what appears to be a prerequisite for the development of writing is a settled, stratified society that has enough trade to support full-time accountants and enough stratification to support kings.

That only happens in settled farming societies. So the development of writing had to wait for the development of settled intensive farming of domesticated crops - AKA a Neolithic society. This didn't happen until about 9000 BCE. So you have to start your clock there.

Answer 2

Civilization only began in the past 8000 years or so. If you have a civilization, there's a much bigger need of a writing system (for record keeping for instance) than there's without a civilization so that might be part of the explanation.

I should add that although there wasn't a writing system before 10K years ago, we do have cave paintings going back to 30K years ago.

Answer 3

Given that the earliest prehistoric art dates from around 35-40 000 years BCE, we can cautiously say that by then they were capable of symbolic representation, and potentially capable of writing.

Writing in at least one sense is much more difficult than art of any kind in that it requires a sustained development of vocabulary and grammar, probably over several generations, and this means a large enough group of people willing to sustain this development; I imagine that need wasn't felt strongly enough until things need to be accounted for in settled communities such as cities.

Answer 4

The first thing is that we do not know how difficult it is to invent scripture if you haven't it. In retrospect things which we consider now "easy" were judged as rubbish or impossible.

The second thing: It is entirely possible that it was invented far before the known scriptures, even as far as 100 000 BC. But how could we know ?

Lets say our culture will be wiped out by a global catastrophe. What will remain of our culture ?

All the computer media ? Destroyed in decades.
Books, scriptures, microfilm ? Destroyed in centuries.

Only metal/stone/ivory engravings under favorable circumstances would be able to last 10 000 years or more and now think how much of our knowledge will remain. So it is possible that ancient people wrote but used materials like us which were not able to last this timespans. Sure, they could have engraved them on the things we found. But very old findings are very rare (we simply missed them) or they did not use them for cultural reasons (taboo).

As long as we have no proof we must assume that they did not write.