Literacy — The Underrated Human (R)Evolution?
The groundbreaking impact of writing and reading on humanity
The ability to read and write — literacy — is a widely common and necessary skill for any person to function in modern society. From an early age, we are taught in school how to read and write in order to survive, since our entire society is dependent on that basic skill set. Without it, modern society would barely function.
But literacy is a rather late phenomenon in human history. Of homo sapiens’ over 300,000 years of existence, the invention of writing only came to us about 5,000 years ago. We have only reaped the benefits of writing and reading for less than 2% of humanity’s entire existence, as far as we know.
The emergence of writing and reading fundamentally changed human existence for many reasons. Literacy not only fully revolutionized human society and technology, but one could say it was a case of human evolution; could literacy be the underrated (r)evolution of humankind?
Invention of Writing
To understand how literacy came to mankind, we have to first look at writing. Writing did not originate and spread from just one single ancient civilization; it was invented more than once, and developed independently in at least three different…
