Re: Capacity for literacy


john0714@xxxxxxx wrote:
When do you think, say, within a 10,000 year window, the first Earth
creature was born, who could be taught to read at what is generally
considered a sixth grade level in the USA today had thre been anyone to
teach him? IIRC reading was invented about 5,000 BC but that late a date
was only because they had to invent the concept of reading from whole
cloth. And primitive illiterate societies discovered around the world
in the last 600 years have had individuals able to learn to read almost
immediately. So I presume the answer would be no later than 35,000 BC,
but how much sooner within a 10,000 year window? Do you think any
neanderthals were capable or any pre-neanderthals?

You've got a number of false presuppositions here. The first
is that Neandertals were ancestral; they weren't, so the
question of whether they could read has no relevance to
when that ability showed up in h.sapiens.

Since Australian aborigines can learn to read, it's got to be
way older. What the facility was used for before writing was
invented is unknown, or at least I don't know, and I've never
heard any speculation.

John Roth

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