South Africa: 60,000 B.C.

"Although man knows that he has lived on this planet for millions of years, he finds a recorded history of only a few thousand years. And even these few thousand years are not sufficiently well known." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, Worlds In Collision, April 1950

"As we shall see again and again, we have such a limited knowledge and practically no understanding of the worlds before our own." -- Brad Steiger, author, Worlds Before Our Own, October 1978

"If we're looking at human history, we can't see very far...." -- Isaac Asimov, author, 1988

"Going back 30,000 years requires you to speculate because we really don't have much an idea what was going on." -- David Morrison, archaeologist, February 26th 2010

New Scientist (March 2010): Oldest 'writing' found on 60,000-year-old eggshells.

COULD these lines etched into 60,000-year-old ostrich eggshells (see photo) be the earliest signs of humans using graphic art to communicate?

Until recently, the first consistent evidence of symbolic communication came from the geometric shapes that appear alongside rock art all over the world, which date to 40,000 years ago (New Scientist, 20 February, p 30). Older finds, like the 75,000-year-old engraved ochre chunks from the Blombos cave in South Africa, have mostly been one-offs and difficult to tell apart from meaningless doodles.

The engraved ostrich eggshells may change that. Since 1999, Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux, France, and his colleagues have uncovered 270 fragments of shell at the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape, South Africa.

They show the same symbols are used over and over again, and the team say there are signs that the symbols evolved over 5000 years.

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

200,000 Years of Man's Unknown Prehistory

History began when humans remembered to forget.

"... just when you and other nations are beginning to be provided with letters and the other requisites of civilized life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like a pestilence, comes pouring down, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves. ...And this was unknown to you, because, for many generations, the survivors of that destruction died, leaving no written word." -- Plato, philosopher, Timaeus, 360 B.C.

"Although man knows that he has lived on this planet for millions of years, he finds a recorded history of only a few thousand years. And even these few thousand years are not sufficiently well known." -- Immanuel Velikovsky, polymath, Worlds in Collision, 1950

"If it were not for the burning of libraries in antiquity, history would not have had so many missing pages." -- Andrew Tomas, author, We Were Not the First, 1971

"It is important to understand this if we are to understand how a science or technology may rise and fall with a civilization, why the destruction of a center could lead to the almost instant evaporation or disappearance of centuries of knowledge and technical skills. Thus a nuclear war could shatter the primary centers of twentieth-century technology in a matter of days. The survivors on the periphery, although they would remember the aeroplanes and the television sets, the robots and the computers, the space machines now circling our solar system, would not be able for centuries to reproduce that technology. Apart from the almost wholesale slaughter of the technocratic class, the interconnection between those shattered centers and the equally critical interdependency between the centers and their peripheries, would be gone forever. It would be like the strands of a web which once stretched across the world, left torn and dangling in a void. A dark age would certainly follow." -- Ivan Van Sertima, historian, 'The Lost Sciences of Africa: An Overview', Blacks In Science: Ancient and Modern, Volume 5, Issues 1-2, 1983