For a long time, anthropologists believed that a written language was a hallmark of a society being complex or 'advanced.' A new study on precolonial Mesoamerican societies shows that you can have a ...

From Latin and Chinese to Tamil and Telugu, discover the top ten most popular writing scripts used around the world ...

Athena Lee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

The late, great sinologist Simon Leys once pointed out a peculiar paradox. China is the world’s oldest surviving civilization, and yet very little material of its past remains—far less than in Europe ...

For more than a century written language was seen by anthropologists and other social scientists as a definitional feature of societal complexity or “advancement” (a term that is tinged with ...