Jared Diamond writes in Guns, Germs, and Steel, “In the last centuries before 3000 B. C., developments in accounting technology, format, and signs rapidly led to the first system of writing.” Diamond supports the commonly accepted view that the oldest writing systems were for the purpose of economics – to keep track of numbers of sheep and amounts of grain, to record trade and other transactions.
But what of the “writing” that appeared on Paleolithic cave walls twenty thousand years earlier? While we are familiar with the drawings of animals that decorate the caves at Lascaux, Altamira and dozens of other cave sites, Paleolithic caves also contain symbols and signs whose meaning we can only guess at but which can be considered a form of writing. These signs consist of + and X signs, and strokes and circles and so on. While many historians might think of these as meaningless cave graffiti, there is no valid reason to discount them as a form of written communication.
And perhaps even earlier, one can imagine the pre-agrarian hunter/gatherer making marks in the earth or on a stick to describe the number of wild animals and the directions in which they are located. The impermanence of these media (wooden sticks, the earth itself) means they have not survived in the same way as Sumerian cuneiform stamped in clay or Egyptian hieroglyphics cut in stone.
Perhaps it all grew out of storytelling. The need to share the story of how I wandered for two moons or seven suns in that direction (arrow drawn on the ground), and while I was there I saw three villages (circles drawn on the ground), and counted fourteen men, thirteen women and seventeen children (lines of various length) who live on a tuber we have never seen and who dance in strange ways.
Or perhaps it was an attempt by one of our earliest ancestors to account for what he or she saw during a vision quest or while walking alone across the empty savannah. Perhaps it was a story, a myth, about one of their gods.
The belief that the first writing was used for economics rather than some other purpose, such as magic, religion or storytelling, reveals a significant bias for economics in the view of historians.