From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Fri May 23 2003 - 11:44:02 MDT
Anders Sandberg wrote,
> Yes, the Great Leap Forward was amazing. But is there any evidence for
> math and written language before agriculture, or even any evidence for a
> move in that direction? The counting tokens that originated in the
> neolithic fertile crescent 9000 years ago seems to be precursors to both
> counting and writing but are coincident with agriculture. To my
> knowledge there are no similar finds before, or writing tendencies in
> cave painting styles.
More than coincident with agriculture, the earliest tokens and symbols we
can find are all agricultural ones counting crops and livestock. Later
there are census ones counting people, cities and armies. It seems that the
increased complexity of agriculture and civilization started the movement
toward writing, numbers, record keeping, and so on. Our modern technology
of computers, databases and internets are just an extensions of agricultural
recordkeeping!
-- Harvey Newstrom, CISSP, IAM, GSEC, IBMCP <www.HarveyNewstrom.com> <www.Newstaff.com>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri May 23 2003 - 11:57:08 MDT