When some people start counting how old the Earth is, and how long human beings have been walking upon it, they ignore ancient and antediluvian history that tells us so much more.
Bibles and various religious groups point to adding up all the years accounted for in Jewish history (Old Testament), as if that is all there is to know. There is more than Jewish history that needs to be accounted for. It is not the only history in the world. Yet still today there are echos in the wind that the human race is only 4,026 years old, as some religions strictly profess. That is incorrect.
I researched through Wikipedia and included the footnotes for your consideration. Click on the blue notes for pictures, graphs, and interesting information.
Writing was long thought to have been invented in a single civilization, a theory named “monogenesis”.[3] Scholars believed that all writing originated in ancient Sumer (in Mesopotamia) and spread over the world from there via a process of cultural diffusion.[3] According to this theory, the concept of representing language by written marks, though not necessarily the specifics of how such a system worked, was passed on by traders or merchants traveling between geographical regions.[a][4]
However, the discovery of the scripts of ancient Mesoamerica, far away from Middle Eastern sources, proved that writing had been invented more than once. Scholars now recognize that writing may have independently developed in at least four ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia (between 3400 and 3100 BCE), Egypt (around 3250 BCE),[5][6][3] China (1200 BCE),[7] and lowland areas of Southern Mexico and Guatemala (by 500 BCE).[8]
Regarding ancient Egypt, several scholars[5][9][10] have argued that “the earliest solid evidence of Egyptian writing differs in structure and style from the Mesopotamian and must therefore have developed independently. The possibility of ‘stimulus diffusion’ from Mesopotamia remains, but the influence cannot have gone beyond the transmission of an idea.”[5][11]
Regarding China, it is believed that ancient Chinese characters are an independent invention because there is no evidence of contact between ancient China and the literate civilizations of the Near East,[12] and because of the distinct differences between the Mesopotamian and Chinese approaches to logography and phonetic representation.[13]
Debate surrounds the Indus script of the Bronze Age Indus Valley Civilisation, the Rongorongo script of Easter Island, and the Vinča symbols dated around 5500 BCE. All are undeciphered, and so it is unknown if they represent authentic writing, proto-writing, or something else.
The Sumerian archaic (pre-cuneiform) writing and Egyptian hieroglyphs are generally considered the earliest true writing systems, both emerging out of their ancestral proto-literate symbol systems from 3400–3100 BCE, with earliest coherent texts from about 2600 BCE. The Proto-Elamite script is also dated to the same approximate period.[14]
Hope you enjoyed this human history lesson. There is more to all of us than we know.
Namaste