For a long time, anthropologists believed that a written language was a hallmark of a society being complex or 'advanced.' A new study on precolonial Mesoamerican societies shows that you can have a ...

Athena Lee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

For more than a century written language was seen by anthropologists and other social scientists as a definitional feature of societal complexity or “advancement” (a term that is tinged with ...

The late, great sinologist Simon Leys once pointed out a peculiar paradox. China is the world’s oldest surviving civilization, and yet very little material of its past remains—far less than in Europe ...

The cuneiform sign for "head" evolved over more than 2,000 years from the pictorial sign on the left to the much abstracted sign on the right. Source: Public Domain/Wikipedia Most of the earliest ...

Indus, Rongorongo, Linear A: Some ancient writing systems cannot be deciphered. Can artificial intelligence help crack the codes of the past? Do you enjoy solving puzzles? What would you do if given a ...