China: 6,500 B.C.

"There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after." -- Ecclesiastes 1:11

BBC (April 2003): 'Earliest writing' found in China.

Signs carved into 8,600-year-old tortoise shells found in China may be the earliest written words, say archaeologists.

The symbols were laid down in the late Stone Age, or Neolithic Age.

They predate the earliest recorded writings from Mesopotamia - in what is now Iraq - by more than 2,000 years.

The archaeologists say they bear similarities to written characters used thousands of years later during the Shang dynasty, which lasted from 1700-1100 BC.

But the discovery has already generated controversy, with one leading researcher in the field branding it "an anomaly".

The archaeologists have identified 11 separate symbols inscribed on the tortoise shells.

The shells were found buried with human remains in 24 Neolithic graves unearthed at Jiahu in Henan province, western China.

The site has been radiocarbon dated to between 6,600 and 6,200 BC.

The research was carried out by Dr Garman Harbottle, of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, US, and a team of archaeologists at the University of Science and Technology of China, in Anhui province.

"What [the markings] appear to show are meaningful signs that have a correspondence with ancient Chinese writing," said Dr Harbottle.

The Neolithic markings include symbols that resemble the characters for "eye" and "window" and the numerals eight and 20 in the Shang script.

"If you pick up a bottle with a skull and crossbones on it, you know instantly that it's poison without the word being spelt out. We're used to signs that convey concepts and I wouldn't be surprised if that's what we're seeing here," Dr Harbottle told BBC News Online. ... The research is published in the journal Antiquity.

Understandably, mainstream Darwinist fundamentalist pseudoscientists feel threatened by actual physical evidence and responded predictably and emotionally: Archaeologists Rewrite History.

The researchers have won support from some archaeologists but been challenged by others, who call their hypothesis "nonsense."

"There is nothing new here," Robert Murowchick, a Boston University archaeologist told Science magazine. He reportedly dismissed the notion "simple geometric signs" can be linked to early writing.

I agree with Sophist Murowchick that "there is nothing new here."

"... there is no new thing under the sun." -- Ecclesiastes 1:9

In fact there is something quite old here.

"Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us." -- Ecclesiastes 1:10