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69-413: Analysis in 2022, led by Bennet Bacon, an amateur archaeologist, showed that lines, dots and "Y"-like symbols on Upper Palaeolithic cave paintings were used to indicate the mating cycle of animals in a lunar calendar . The markings found in over 400 caves across Europe were compared to the mating cycles of the animals with which they were associated, showing a correlation with the month of the year in which

138-528: A Semitic language, the vowel sounds were left implicit—though late varieties sometimes used matres lectionis to denote some vowels . As its letters were originally incised using a stylus , their forms are mostly angular and straight, though cursive forms increased in use over time, culminating in the Neo-Punic alphabet used in Roman North Africa . The earliest known proto-alphabetic inscriptions are

207-572: A combination of two 10-tacks, approximately Z-shaped. Larger multiples of ten were formed by grouping the appropriate number of 20s and 10s. There existed several glyph variants for 100 (𐤙). The 100 symbol could be multiplied by a preceding numeral, e.g. the combination of 4 and 100 yielded 400. The system did not contain a numeral zero . Phoenician was prolific. Many of the writing systems in use today can ultimately trace their descent to it, so ultimately to Egyptian hieroglyphs . The Latin , Cyrillic , Armenian and Georgian scripts are derived from

276-642: A small elite. Another reason for its success was the maritime trading culture of Phoenician merchants, which spread the alphabet into parts of North Africa and Southern Europe. Phoenician inscriptions have been found in archaeological sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos (in present-day Lebanon ) and Carthage in North Africa. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt. The alphabet had long-term effects on

345-483: A specific purpose. The early modern humans who expanded into Europe, commonly referred to as the Cro-Magnons , left many sophisticated stone tools, carved and engraved pieces on bone, ivory and antler , cave paintings and Venus figurines . The Neanderthals continued to use Mousterian stone tool technology and possibly Châtelperronian technology. These tools disappeared from the archeological record at around

414-560: A system. Another example is the system of pictographs invented by Uyaquk before the development of the Yugtun syllabary (c. 1900). Nsibidi is a system of symbols indigenous to what is now southeastern Nigeria . While there remains no commonly accepted exact date of origin, most researchers agree that use of the earliest symbols date back between the 5th and 15th centuries. There are thousands of Nsibidi symbols which were used on anything from calabashes to tattoos and to wall designs. Nsibidi

483-515: A way to convey seasonal behavioural information about hunted animals. Lines (|) and dots (•) were apparently used interchangeably to denote lunar months, while the (Y) sign apparently signified "To give birth". These characters were seemingly combined to convey the breeding period of hunted animals. The climate of the period in Europe saw dramatic changes, and included the Last Glacial Maximum ,

552-528: Is a further derivation from Sogdian. The Arabic script is a medieval cursive variant of Nabataean , itself an offshoot of Aramaic. It has been proposed, notably by Georg Bühler (1898), that the Brahmi script of India (and by extension the derived Indic alphabets ) was ultimately derived from the Aramaic script, which would make Phoenician the ancestor of virtually every alphabetic writing system in use today, with

621-552: Is a regional variant of the Phoenician alphabet, so called when used to write early Hebrew . The Samaritan alphabet is a development of Paleo-Hebrew, emerging in the 6th century BC. The South Arabian script may be derived from a stage of the Proto-Sinaitic script predating the mature development of the Phoenician alphabet proper. The Geʽez script developed from South Arabian. The Phoenician alphabet continued to be used by

690-456: Is almost impossible to understand because they are not related to any living languages. While Gómez-Moreno first pointed to a joined Phoenician-Greek origin, following authors consider that their genesis has no relation to Greek. The most remote script of the group is the Tartessian or Southwest script which could be one or several different scripts. The main bulk of PH inscriptions use, by far,

759-511: Is also found from a 125,000 years old artefacts in Buya , Eritrea and in other places such as Blombos cave in South Africa . More complex social groupings emerged, supported by more varied and reliable food sources and specialized tool types. This probably contributed to increasing group identification or ethnicity . The peopling of Australia most likely took place before c. 60 ka . Europe

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828-535: Is based on a cave lion skeleton found in Seigsdorf, Germany which has hunting lesions. 14,000 BP Fertile Crescent : Europe : Africa : Siberia : The Upper Paleolithic in the Franco-Cantabrian region : Phoenician alphabet The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad (consonantal alphabet ) used across the Mediterranean civilization of Phoenicia for most of the 1st millennium BC. It

897-492: Is derived from Italic, the Cyrillic alphabet from medieval Greek. The Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic scripts are derived from Aramaic (the latter as a medieval cursive variant of Nabataean ). Ge'ez is from South Arabian . Phoenician used a system of acrophony to name letters: a word was chosen with each initial consonant sound, and became the name of the letter for that sound. These names were not arbitrary: each Phoenician letter

966-504: Is derived from the Phoenician. With a different phonology, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician script to represent their own sounds, including the vowels absent in Phoenician. It was possibly more important in Greek to write out vowel sounds: Phoenician being a Semitic language, words were based on consonantal roots that permitted extensive removal of vowels without loss of meaning, a feature absent in

1035-630: Is used for the Ekoid and Igboid languages , and the Aro people are known to write Nsibidi messages on the bodies of their messengers. Upper Palaeolithic The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic ) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age . Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene ), according to some theories coinciding with

1104-754: The Arabic alphabet . The Hebrew alphabet emerges in the Second Temple period , from around 300 BC, out of the Aramaic alphabet used in the Persian empire. There was, however, a revival of the Phoenician mode of writing later in the Second Temple period, with some instances from the Qumran Caves , such as the Paleo-Hebrew Leviticus scroll dated to the 2nd or 1st century BC. By the 5th century BC, among Jews

1173-800: The Balkans , parts of the Iberian Peninsula and areas around the Black Sea . This period saw cultures such as the Solutrean in France and Spain. Human life may have continued on top of the ice sheet, but we know next to nothing about it, and very little about the human life that preceded the European glaciers. In the early part of the period, up to about 30 kya, the Mousterian Pluvial made northern Africa, including

1242-534: The Frankleben hoard , are discussed by Sommerfeld (1994). Sommerfeld favours an interpretation of these symbols as numerals associated with a lunar calendar . Even after the Bronze Age, several cultures have gone through a period of using systems of proto-writing as an intermediate stage before the adoption of writing proper. The " Slavic runes " (7th/8th century) mentioned by a few medieval authors may have been such

1311-575: The Greek alphabet , which evolved from Phoenician; the Aramaic alphabet , also descended from Phoenician, evolved into the Arabic and Hebrew scripts. It has also been theorised that the Brahmi and subsequent Brahmic scripts of the Indian cultural sphere also descended from Aramaic, effectively uniting most of the world's writing systems under one family, although the theory is disputed. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet

1380-566: The Indo-European Greek. However, Akkadian cuneiform , which wrote a related Semitic language, did indicate vowels, which suggests the Phoenicians simply accepted the model of the Egyptians, who never wrote vowels. In any case, the Greeks repurposed the Phoenician letters of consonant sounds not present in Greek; each such letter had its name shorn of its leading consonant, and the letter took

1449-584: The Late Bronze Age , which was derived in turn from Egyptian hieroglyphs . The Phoenician alphabet was used to write Canaanite languages spoken during the Early Iron Age , sub-categorized by historians as Phoenician , Hebrew , Moabite , Ammonite and Edomite , as well as Old Aramaic . It was widely disseminated outside of the Canaanite sphere by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean, where it

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1518-711: The Northeastern Iberian script , which serves to write Iberian in the levantine coast North of Contestania and in the valle of the river Ebro (Hiber). The Iberic language is also recorded using two other scripts: the Southeastern Iberian script , which is more similar to the Southwest script than to Northeastern Iberian; and a variant of the Ionic Greek Alphabet called the Greco-Iberian alphabet . Finally,

1587-706: The Proto-Sinaitic script sporadically attested in the Sinai Peninsula and in Canaan in the late Middle and Late Bronze Age . The script was not widely used until the rise of Syro-Hittite states in the 13th and 12th centuries BC. The Phoenician alphabet is a direct continuation of the "Proto-Canaanite" script of the Bronze Age collapse period. The inscriptions found on the Phoenician arrowheads at al-Khader near Bethlehem and dated c.  1100 BC offered

1656-815: The Sahara , well-watered and with lower temperatures than today; after the end of the Pluvial the Sahara became arid. The Last Glacial Maximum was followed by the Allerød oscillation , a warm and moist global interstadial that occurred around 13.5 to 13.8 kya. Then there was a very rapid onset, perhaps within as little as a decade, of the cold and dry Younger Dryas climate period, giving sub-arctic conditions to much of northern Europe. The Preboreal rise in temperatures also began sharply around 10.3 kya, and by its end around 9.0 kya had brought temperatures nearly to present day levels, although

1725-516: The Samaritans and developed into the Samaritan alphabet, that is an immediate continuation of the Phoenician script without intermediate non-Israelite evolutionary stages. The Samaritans have continued to use the script for writing both Hebrew and Aramaic texts until the present day. A comparison of the earliest Samaritan inscriptions and the medieval and modern Samaritan manuscripts clearly indicates that

1794-459: The epigraphists the "missing link" between the two. The Ahiram epitaph , whose dating is controversial, engraved on the sarcophagus of king Ahiram in Byblos, Lebanon, one of five known Byblian royal inscriptions , shows essentially the fully developed Phoenician script, although the name "Phoenician" is by convention given to inscriptions beginning in the mid-11th century BC. Beginning in

1863-439: The fish hook , the oil lamp , rope , and the eyed needle . Fishing of pelagic fish species and navigating the open ocean is evidenced by sites from Timor and Buka ( Solomon Islands ). The changes in human behavior have been attributed to changes in climate, encompassing a number of global temperature drops. These led to a worsening of the already bitter cold of the last glacial period (popularly but incorrectly called

1932-439: The 11th century. The oldest inscriptions are dated to the 10th century. The Phoenician alphabet was deciphered in 1758 by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy , but its relation to the Phoenicians remained unknown until the 19th century. It was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs , which were deciphered by Champollion in the early 19th century. However, scholars could not find any link between

2001-552: The 3rd century BC (although some letter shapes did not become standard until the 1st century AD). The Kharosthi script is an Aramaic-derived alphasyllabary used in the Indo-Greek Kingdom in the 3rd century BC. The Syriac alphabet is the derived form of Aramaic used in the early Christian period. The Sogdian alphabet is derived from Syriac. It is in turn an ancestor of the Old Uyghur . The Manichaean alphabet

2070-505: The 7th millennium BC. According to some archaeologists, the symbols bear a resemblance to the first attested oracle bone inscriptions dating to c.  1200 BC . Others have dismissed this claim as insufficiently substantiated, claiming that simple geometric designs such as those found on the Jiahu shells cannot be linked to early writing. The Vinča symbols (6th–5th millennia BC) are an evolution of simple symbols first attested during

2139-557: The 7th millennium BC). Over time, the symbols gradually became more complex, ultimately culminating in the Tărtăria tablets ( c.  5300 BC ). During c.  3600  – c.  3200 BC , proto-writing in the Fertile Crescent was gradually evolving into cuneiform , the earliest mature writing system. The Kish tablet ( c.  3500 BC ) reflects the stage of proto-cuneiform , when what would become

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2208-495: The 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet thrived, including Greek , Old Italic and Anatolian scripts. The alphabet's attractive innovation was its phonetic nature, in which one sound was represented by one symbol , which meant only a few dozen symbols to learn. The other scripts of the time, cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs , employed many complex characters and required long professional training to achieve proficiency; which had restricted literacy to

2277-636: The Americas by about 15 ka. In Western Eurasia, the Paleolithic eases into the so-called Epipaleolithic or Mesolithic from the end of the LGM, beginning 15 ka. The Holocene glacial retreat begins 11.7 ka ( 10th millennium BC ), falling well into the Old World Epipaleolithic, and marking the beginning of the earliest forms of farming in the Fertile Crescent . Both Homo erectus and Neanderthals used

2346-587: The Bronze Age, such as Europe, India and China, remained in the stage of proto-writing. The Chinese script emerged from proto-writing in the Chinese Bronze Age , during about the 14th to 11th centuries BC ( Oracle bone script ), while symbol systems native to Europe and India are extinct and replaced by descendants of the Semitic abjad during the Iron Age . The Indus script is a symbol system that emerged during

2415-453: The Common Era. According to Herodotus , the Phoenician prince Cadmus was accredited with the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet— phoinikeia grammata 'Phoenician letters'—to the Greeks, who adapted it to form their Greek alphabet . Herodotus claims that the Greeks did not know of the Phoenician alphabet before Cadmus. He estimates that Cadmus lived 1600 years before his time, while

2484-659: The European Bronze Age which amount to interpreting them as an indigenous tradition of proto-writing. Of special interest in this context are the Central European Bronze Age cultures derived from the Beaker culture in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. Interpretations of the markings of the bronze sickles associated with the Urnfield culture , especially the large number of so-called "knob-sickles" discovered in

2553-685: The Greeks kept approximations of the Phoenician names, albeit they did not mean anything to them other than the letters themselves; on the other hand, the Latins (and presumably the Etruscans from whom they borrowed a variant of the Western Greek alphabet ) and the Orthodox Slavs (at least when naming the Cyrillic letters, which came to them from the Greek by way of the Glagolitic ) based their names purely on

2622-610: The Latin alphabet itself, some early Old Italic alphabet via the Alpine scripts, or the Greek alphabet. Despite this debate, the Runic alphabet is clearly derived from one or more scripts that ultimately trace their roots back to the Phoenician alphabet. The Coptic alphabet is mostly based on the mature Greek alphabet of the Hellenistic period , with a few additional letters for sounds not in Greek at

2691-580: The Phoenician alphabet had been mostly replaced by the Aramaic alphabet as officially used in the Persian empire (which, like all alphabetical writing systems, was itself ultimately a descendant of the Proto-Canaanite script, though through intermediary non-Israelite stages of evolution). The " Jewish square-script " variant now known simply as the Hebrew alphabet evolved directly out of the Aramaic script by about

2760-402: The Phoenician letter was called bet and had the sound value b . According to a 1904 theory by Theodor Nöldeke , some of the letter names were changed in Phoenician from the Proto-Canaanite script. This includes: Yigael Yadin (1963) went to great lengths to prove that there was actual battle equipment similar to some of the original letter forms named for weapons (samek, zayin). Later,

2829-461: The Phoenician letters for those consonants as well.) The Alphabets of Asia Minor are generally assumed to be offshoots of archaic versions of the Greek alphabet. The Latin alphabet was derived from Old Italic (originally derived from a form of the Greek alphabet), used for Etruscan and other languages. The origin of the Runic alphabet is disputed: the main theories are that it evolved either from

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2898-461: The Samaritan script is a static script which was used mainly as a book hand . The Aramaic alphabet, used to write Aramaic , is an early descendant of Phoenician. Aramaic, being the lingua franca of the Middle East, was widely adopted. It later split off into a number of related alphabets, including Hebrew , Syriac , and Nabataean , the latter of which, in its cursive form, became an ancestor of

2967-417: The animals depicted in the cave paintings would typically give birth. The markings were 20,000 years old, predating any other equivalent writing systems by 10,000 years. In 2003, turtle shells with carved inscriptions featuring a library of symbols were found in 24 Neolithic graves excavated at Jiahu in the northern Chinese province of Henan . Using radiocarbon dating , the inscriptions have been dated to

3036-601: The appearance of behavioral modernity in early modern humans , until the advent of the Neolithic Revolution and agriculture . Anatomically modern humans (i.e. Homo sapiens ) are believed to have emerged in Africa around 300,000 years ago. It has been argued by some that their ways of life changed relatively little from that of archaic humans of the Middle Paleolithic , until about 50,000 years ago, when there

3105-673: The climate was wetter. This period saw the Upper Paleolithic give way to the start of the following Mesolithic cultural period. As the glaciers receded sea levels rose; the English Channel , Irish Sea and North Sea were land at this time, and the Black Sea a fresh-water lake. In particular the Atlantic coastline was initially far out to sea in modern terms in most areas, though the Mediterranean coastline has retreated far less, except in

3174-402: The coldest phase of the last glacial period , which lasted from about 26.5 to 19 kya, being coldest at the end, before relatively rapid warming (all dates vary somewhat for different areas, and in different studies). During the Maximum, most of Northern Europe was covered by an ice-sheet , forcing human populations into the areas known as Last Glacial Maximum refugia , including modern Italy and

3243-401: The consonant-only Phoenician letters. There were also distinct variants of the writing system in different parts of Greece, primarily in how those Phoenician characters that did not have an exact match to Greek sounds were used. The Ionic variant evolved into the standard Greek alphabet, and the Cumae variant into the Italic alphabets (including the Latin alphabet ). The Runic alphabet

3312-405: The cuneiform script of Sumer was still in the proto-writing stage. By the end of the 4th millennium BC, this symbol system had evolved into a method of keeping accounts, using a round-shaped stylus impressed into soft clay at different angles for recording numbers on clay tablets and accounting tokens . This was gradually augmented with pictographic writing using a sharp stylus to indicate what

3381-442: The end of the 4th millennium BC in the Indus Valley Civilisation . With the exception of the Aegean and mainland Greece ( Linear A , Linear B , Cretan hieroglyphs ), the early writing systems of the Near East did not reach Bronze Age Europe . The earliest writing systems of Europe arise in the Iron Age , derived from the Phoenician alphabet . However, there are number of interpretations regarding symbols found on artefacts of

3450-449: The historical adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks was barely 350 years before Herodotus. The Phoenician alphabet was known to the Jewish sages of the Second Temple era , who called it the "Old Hebrew" ( Paleo-Hebrew ) script. The conventional date of 1050 BC for the emergence of the Phoenician script was chosen because there is a gap in the epigraphic record; there are not actually any Phoenician inscriptions securely dated to

3519-414: The influence of the latter ...", although it is pointed out and held that "the evidence for such direct influence remains flimsy" and that "a very credible argument can also be made for the independent development of writing in Egypt ..." During the Bronze Age , the cultures of the Ancient Near East are known to have had fully developed writing systems, while the marginal territories affected by

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3588-422: The initial creation of new alphabets and from gradual pronunciation changes which did not immediately lead to spelling changes. The Phoenician letter forms shown are idealized: actual Phoenician writing is less uniform, with significant variations by era and region. When alphabetic writing began, with the early Greek alphabet , the letter forms were similar but not identical to Phoenician, and vowels were added to

3657-445: The last ice age ). Such changes may have reduced the supply of usable timber and forced people to look at other materials. In addition, flint becomes brittle at low temperatures and may not have functioned as a tool. Some notational signs, used next to images of animals, may have appeared as early as the Upper Palaeolithic in Europe circa 35,000 BCE, and may be the earliest proto-writing : several symbols were used in combination as

3726-414: The letters' sounds. The Phoenician numeral system consisted of separate symbols for 1, 10, 20, and 100. The sign for 1 was a simple vertical stroke (𐤖). Other numerals up to 9 were formed by adding the appropriate number of such strokes, arranged in groups of three. The symbol for 10 was a horizontal line or tack ( 𐤗 ‎). The sign for 20 (𐤘) could come in different glyph variants, one of them being

3795-431: The north of the Adriatic and the Aegean . The rise in sea levels continued until at least 7.5 kya ( 5500 BC ), so evidence of human activity along Europe's coasts in the Upper Paleolithic is mostly lost, though some traces have been recovered by fishing boats and marine archaeology , especially from Doggerland , the lost area beneath the North Sea. The first direct evidence for Neanderthals hunting cave lions . This

3864-484: The notable exception of hangul . It is certain that the Aramaic-derived Kharosthi script was present in northern India by the 4th century BC, so that the Aramaic model of alphabetic writing would have been known in the region, but the link from Kharosthi to the slightly younger Brahmi is tenuous. Bühler's suggestion is still entertained in mainstream scholarship, but it has never been proven conclusively, and no definitive scholarly consensus exists. The Greek alphabet

3933-709: The same crude stone tools. Archaeologist Richard G. Klein , who has worked extensively on ancient stone tools, describes the stone tool kit of archaic hominids as impossible to categorize. He argues that almost everywhere, whether Asia , Africa or Europe , before 50,000 years ago all the stone tools are much alike and unsophisticated. Firstly among the artefacts of Africa, archeologists found they could differentiate and classify those of less than 50,000 years into many different categories, such as projectile points, engraving tools, knife blades, and drilling and piercing tools. These new stone-tool types have been described as being distinctly differentiated from each other; each tool had

4002-421: The same time the Neanderthals themselves disappeared from the fossil record, about 40,000 cal BP. Settlements were often located in narrow valley bottoms, possibly associated with hunting of passing herds of animals. Some of them may have been occupied year round, though more commonly they appear to have been used seasonally; people moved between the sites to exploit different food sources at different times of

4071-636: The social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. Its simplicity not only allowed its easy adaptation to multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. This upset the long-standing status of literacy as an exclusive achievement of royal and religious elites, scribes who used their monopoly on information to control the common population. The appearance of Phoenician disintegrated many of these class divisions, although many Middle Eastern kingdoms, such as Assyria , Babylonia and Adiabene , would continue to use cuneiform for legal and liturgical matters well into

4140-497: The time. Those additional letters are based on the Demotic script . The Cyrillic script was derived from the late (medieval) Greek alphabet. Some Cyrillic letters (generally for sounds not in medieval Greek) are based on Glagolitic forms. These were an indigenous set of genetically related semisyllabaries , which suited the phonological characteristics of the Tartessian , Iberian and Celtiberian languages. They were deciphered in 1922 by Manuel Gómez-Moreno but their content

4209-461: The two writing systems, nor to hieratic or cuneiform. The theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single individual conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian. It was eventually discovered that the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet was inspired by the model of hieroglyphs. The chart shows the graphical evolution of Phoenician letter forms into other alphabets. The sound values also changed significantly, both at

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4278-477: The value of the now-leading vowel. For example, ʾāleph , which designated a glottal stop in Phoenician, was repurposed to represent the vowel /a/ ; he became /e/ , ḥet became /eː/ (a long vowel), ʿayin became /o/ (because the pharyngeality altered the following vowel), while the two semi-consonants wau and yod became the corresponding high vowels, /u/ and /i/ . (Some dialects of Greek, which did possess /h/ and /w/ , continued to use

4347-486: The year. Hunting was important, and caribou/wild reindeer "may well be the species of single greatest importance in the entire anthropological literature on hunting". Technological advances included significant developments in flint tool manufacturing, with industries based on fine blades rather than simpler and shorter flakes . Burins and racloirs were used to work bone, antler and hides . Advanced darts and harpoons also appear in this period, along with

4416-560: Was a marked increase in the diversity of artefacts found associated with modern human remains. This period coincides with the most common date assigned to expansion of modern humans from Africa throughout Asia and Eurasia, which contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals . The Upper Paleolithic has the earliest known evidence of organized settlements , in the form of campsites, some with storage pits. Artistic work blossomed, with cave painting, petroglyphs , carvings and engravings on bone or ivory. The first evidence of human fishing

4485-420: Was adopted and adapted by other cultures. The Phoenician alphabet proper was used in Ancient Carthage until the 2nd century BC, where it was used to write the Punic language . Its direct descendant scripts include the Aramaic and Samaritan alphabets, several Alphabets of Asia Minor , and the Archaic Greek alphabets . The Phoenician alphabet proper uses 22 consonant letters—as an abjad used to write

4554-411: Was based on an Egyptian hieroglyph representing an Egyptian word; this word was translated into Phoenician (or a closely related Semitic language), then the initial sound of the translated word became the letter's Phoenician value. For example, the second letter of the Phoenician alphabet was based on the Egyptian hieroglyph for "house" (a sketch of a house); the Semitic word for 'house' was bet ; hence

4623-410: Was being counted. The transitional stage to a writing system proper takes place in the Jemdet Nasr period ( c.  3100 BC  – c.  2900 BC ). A similar development took place in the genesis of the Egyptian hieroglyphs . Various scholars believe that Egyptian hieroglyphs "came into existence a little after Sumerian script , and ... probably [were] ... invented under

4692-416: Was one of the first alphabets, and attested in Canaanite and Aramaic inscriptions found across the Mediterranean region . In the history of writing systems , the Phoenician script also marked the first to have a fixed writing direction —while previous systems were multi-directional, Phoenician was written horizontally, from right to left. It developed directly from the Proto-Sinaitic script used during

4761-435: Was peopled after c. 45 ka. Anatomically modern humans are known to have expanded northward into Siberia as far as the 58th parallel by about 45 ka ( Ust'-Ishim man ). The Upper Paleolithic is divided by the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), from about 25 to 15 ka. The peopling of the Americas occurred during this time, with East and Central Asia populations reaching the Bering land bridge after about 35 ka, and expanding into

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