The Evolution of Written Language

✍️ In a recent study, a team of researchers at Germany's Max Planck Institute showed how written language very quickly evolves to become 'compressed' for efficient reading and writing. Their work, published last week in Current Anthropology, was based on a manuscript depicting a rare African writing system called Vai.

• The Vai script of Liberia (☝️) was created from scratch in 1834 by eight completely illiterate men who were inspired by a dream and wrote in ink made from crushed berries.
• "Because of [Vai’s] isolation, and the way it has continued to develop up until the present day, we thought it might tell us something important about how writing evolves over short spaces of time," said study member and linguistic anthropologist Piers Kelly.
• Kelly and his colleagues analyzed the 200-letter alphabet of the Vai people from 1834 onwards and found it became increasingly compressed and simplified as time passed.
• These changes were far from random, the researchers explained; over generations of users, letters with the highest complexity were simplified the most. It's almost like a natural selection process where harder-to-remember features die off.

+Zoom out: Scholars generally agree the invention of writing occurred ~5,500 years ago in the Middle East, with the process being reinvented over and over again ever since. 

+Fun fact: The oldest known cave painting is a life-sized picture of a wild pig that was made at least 45,500 years ago in Indonesia.