A (Brief) History of Writing

from early man to the present day

Reading and writing are not naturally learned skills. They have to be taught specifically and yet we take it for granted that we can communicate with each other by means of the written word.

Where did this ability come from in the first place? How did humans first realise we could make marks that others would recognise as representations of things in our world?

How did those marks evolve into the complicated sets of symbols we use for writing today?

Perhaps the answer lies in the present rather than the past. We might go some way towards answering this question by drawing a parallel between the development of children, and how they learn the significance of signs and symbols, and the development of early human beings in general.