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Today, we still rely on certain kinds of symbols in much the same way as our ice age forbears. The use of symbols as tokens of social trust is evident across the World Wide Web, where people routinely rely on disembodied symbols to evoke emotional responses and forge bonds of trust with each other: for example, the use of icons in instant messaging applications to represent emotional states (smiley faces, angry faces, sad faces, etc.); or trust ratings on eBay, where complete strangers routinely transact business with each other purely on the basis of iconic representations of social capital. Similar trust mechanisms play a crucial role in facilitating the success of user reviews at
Amazon.com
, and any other number of Web sites where people routinely exchange information and seal bonds of trust with complete strangers. These interactions are not so far removed from the symbolic exchanges of trust and coding of social rank that ice age people achieved using beads, shells, and necklaces.

Symbolic expression, then, originated not just as an aesthetic or a spiritual pursuit but also as a pragmatic adaptation to changing environmental conditions. “Art is a cultural equivalent of mutation,” says New York University archaeologist Randall White. “We know that bipedalism was caused by a genetic mutation that allowed some creatures to be able to stand upright, and that proved advantageous. What about the individual or social group that creates drawings of animals? What is the adaptive value of that? Well, for one thing, it creates the ability to communicate with each other through images,” says White. From this perspective we can view ice age art as more than just a first foray into spiritual or aesthetic expression, but also as a practical adaptation to changing environmental conditions. “We’ve tended to think of the imagery from this period as ‘art’ in the soft sense that people were into evocative images, and animals really meant a lot to them, etc.—and maybe they did. But you also have people who are capable, using artwork, of showing someone else how an animal behaves, or where best to plant a spear, or any number of practical applications.”
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We often think of “art” as a rarefied form of human achievement, a capacity that emerges only during periods of relative prosperity. Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs places cultural expression at the very top of the pyramid, expressing the common assumption that humans come to worry about aesthetic expression only after we secure our supposedly “basic” needs like food, shelter, and physical security. But the archaeological record suggests that symbolic expression was no esoteric exercise; it was a matter of survival. Symbolic expression seems to have played a critical role in cementing social relationships. As Durkheim writes, “in all its aspects and at every moment of history, social life is only possible thanks to a vast symbolism.”

White has studied the evolution of art among ice age cultures and has concluded that art played an essential role in enabling
Homo sapiens
to survive during this period. “People don’t think about art as a necessity,” says White. “But it seems to have arisen as an attempt to cope with some very difficult circumstances. Art corresponds to periods of stress much more than it corresponds to periods of well-being
and leisure. There is no question that art is not being produced as a result of people having more spare time; it is being produced when all hell is breaking loose and people don’t have enough to eat.”
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The most spectacular examples of ice age art are the famous cave paintings of Cro-Magnon Europe. At the caves of Lascaux, Altamira, and a host of smaller sites, the charcoal-and-pigment paintings and etched figures of bison, mammoth, and even rhinoceroses have captivated the public imagination for years. While the purpose of these paintings inevitably remains a subject of speculation,
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most scholars agree that the paintings served at least in part as a practical method for building social consensus. In all likelihood, cave paintings served more than just a ritualistic or an aesthetic purpose; they may also have functioned as informational tools, the preliterate equivalent of a how-to manual or encyclopedia. Cave paintings allowed social groups to coalesce around fixed images, shared reference points that gave them a way to align their thoughts around a common object . Just as stigmergy provides a mechanism for indirect collaboration between individual members of a social group, so cave paintings may have served as a means for people to introduce social constraints on each other’s behavior.

While historians typically assign writing a special status as the harbinger of “civilization,” the building blocks of complex information systems were in place long before the first scribe set stylus to clay. “Each society creates culture and is created by it,” writes Wilson. “Through constant grooming, decorating, exchange of gifts, sharing of food and fermented beverages, music, and storytelling, the symbolic communal life of the mind takes form, unifying the group into a dreamworld that masters the external reality into which the group has been thrust.”
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Human beings have invested long millennia in forging social bonds through the stigmergy of symbols, invoking our shared yearning to make our dreamworlds real.

The ice age information explosion brought humanity to the brink of literacy. For tens of thousands of years, the infrastructure of tribal information systems—folk taxonomies, mythological systems, and preliterate symbolism—created the conditions for the emergence of literate culture. For most of our species’ time on earth, we relied on
oral traditions—storytelling, folk taxonomies, and gesture—to preserve and transmit information between generations. The advent of symbols would change the shape of human social organization, bringing people together in larger social groups and, eventually, leading them across the threshold to an even more revolutionary adaptation: writing.

Nigerians used to believe that the first writers were monkeys. Ancient Chinese people credited a sacred turtle.
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The Mayans and Assyrians attributed the sons of their respective creator gods. Certain Arab traditions maintain the first writer to have been no less a person than Mohammed. Stories explaining the origins of writing vary as widely as the cultures that produce them, but every human society that has crossed the threshold to literacy has assigned writing a status worthy of myth.

A more prosaic account for the origins of writing might take us to the city of Uruk, in the ancient kingdom of Sumer. By about 5000 BC, a growing population was coalescing into the first human settlement to resemble a city: “a mind-defeating jumble of temples, dwellings, storerooms, and alleyways,”
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as historian Thomas Cahill describes it. The people of Uruk, having mastered a few basic agricultural techniques, had started to settle in a growing population center with a flourishing trade and increasingly specialized classes of workers: farmers, merchants, builders, and a ruling class of elite citizens. It was the world’s first boomtown.

The sheer concentration of people created a cauldron of technological innovations. During this period, ancient Sumerians invented
the wheel, sailing ships, molded bricks, metals, and architectural breakthroughs like vaults and domes. They were the first people to divide the day into hours.
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Amid such a prolific period of innovation, the typical Sumerian might have scarcely noticed the curious little etchings that merchants were starting to make in clay tablets while they tried to keep track of their accounts.
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The booming commercial trade in Uruk created an unprecedented volume of transactions: As merchants struggled to keep up with an expanding commercial economy, they needed to develop better systems for keeping track of their accounts. The first forms of writing emerged “not for magical and liturgical purposes,” writes V. Gordon Childe, “but for practical business and administration.”
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Samuel Johnson once remarked that “no man but a fool ever wrote except for money.” Indeed, if it weren’t for money, we might have no writing at all. Much as we like to think of writing as the fruit of high culture, all literature originates from the basest of all commercial transactions: sales receipts.

Writing appears to have emerged with little fanfare, arising as a practical innovation to take advantage of two prior technologies: drawing and counting. The earliest tabulating devices were notched bones dated to 35,000 to 20,000 BC—the earliest known representations of numbers. By the ninth century BC, clay tokens had emerged as units of basic currency—appearing almost simultaneously in Mesopotamia, Iran, Sudan, Palestine, and Syria. The first written notations were called
bullae
(tokens). Shaped like disks, cones, spheres, tetrahedrons, ovoids, cylinders, triangles, or animal heads, each token represented some form of commercial transaction: records of purchases, debts, or contractual obligations. The oldest specimens yet discovered date back as far as 3500 BC. By 3000 BC the earliest examples of what we would recognize as “writing” emerged, when merchants began transcribing the contents of
bullae
onto clay tablets.

As written tablets took hold as a commercial technology, a new class of professional scribes emerged. These early knowledge workers facilitated trade by serving as trusted third parties who could record transactions between two or more parties. A typical written receipt might read something like this: “Offer Gentleman B the enclosed
message from Gentleman A.”
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After kneading wet clay into a cylinder or tablet, the scribe would record the details of the transaction by scraping marks into the surface using a wedge-shaped stylus. Both parties would put their marks on the tablet. The scribe would place his own seal, and the contract would be baked into the permanent record. Because clay dried quickly, the scribes had to work fast; this was no medium for poetry. Once the tablet was baked, the scribe would then deposit it on a shelf or put it in a basket, with labels affixed to the outside to facilitate future search and retrieval.

Linguist Walter J. Ong has charted a pattern of social transformation that appears to recur across human cultures that have made the transition to literacy. Writing invariably emerges at first to support commerce. This phase marks a period of “craft literacy,” during which “writing is a trade practiced by craftsmen, whom others hire to write a letter or document as they might hire a stone-mason to build a house, or a shipwright to build a boat.”
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The clay-based information economy would dominate the ancient Near East for the next 2,500 years, as networks of trade spread to neighboring regions that in turn created their own local scripts. The yeomen Mediterranean scribes, equipped with their styli and lumps of clay, provided a bedrock layer of trust that supported a growing network of commercial activity. Just as beads and bone totems had enabled ice age people to expand their social circles, so writing served a similar purpose, enabling otherwise unknown parties to forge reliable social bonds cemented by new forms of documents like contracts, laws, and religious rites. The new technology thus facilitated another degree of social abstraction, enabling people to coalesce into farther-flung social networks. From these networks, new kinds of hierarchies would soon emerge.

As literary craftsmen began to accumulate power over the conduct of day-to-day transactions, a new kind of collective entity began to form around them. Just as ancient bacteria had joined into complex organisms, so the ancient scribes slowly came together into larger social organisms: institutions.

While writing had originated as a tool for helping individuals buy and sell, its use gradually expanded to encompass larger-scale governmental and religious functions. The economic power of writing afforded scribes a social status second only to the king, increasingly concentrating power in the hands of a literate bureaucratic elite. The escalating complexity of these relationships, coupled with the need for third parties capable of providing both authority and trust, gave rise to multiperson knowledge bureaus predicated on the power of the written word. As human settlements grew, the stewardship of writing slowly passed from the hands of individual craftspeople to fall under the purview of new organizational entities: institutions. The first government bureaucracies, religious temples, and educational institutions began to take shape.

As writing gave rise to increasingly complex institutions, writing itself became more complex. At the Ebla site in Syria, archaeologists found a literary treasure trove of 2,000 tablets dating as far back as 2300 BC. Most contain records of routine transactions involving textiles, olive oil, cereals, and other staple products. The Ebla site also contains another set of tablets, set apart from the rest in a neat pile atop the other manuscripts. These tablets contain different kinds of lists that serve no apparent transactional purpose: lists of birds and fish, geographical locations, the names of professions. One tablet consists solely of a list of the other tablets (though not in any discernible order). Another such “meta” document appears at the ancient Hittite site of Hattusas, near Ankara, where archaeologists discovered what appears to be the first-known bibliographic record: a list of other documents that includes title pages and rudimentary colophons containing brief descriptions of each tablet. For example:

In addition to information about the author and subject of the document, each colophon included a number, indicating that the tablets were stacked in a predictable sequence. The colophon also al
lowed for a brief set of keywords to provide readers with a glimpse of the document’s contents, a kind of primitive abstract to help prospective readers limn the contents of a tablet before investing the time to read it. The Hittites had mastered all the basic functions of a library catalog, capturing information about authors and subjects in a digestible form and adding call numbers to help users retrieve the document they wanted. Melvil Dewey
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would have been proud.