When most modern people hear the words “Educational Technology,” they think of computers, laptops, tablets, and now generative artificial intelligence. But one of the most important technologies that has advanced civilization was the development and refinement of writing tools, inks, and writing surfaces (or substrates). The development of written language was essential in passing accumulated knowledge to future generations. Writing tools were an essential technology that developed alongside written language. The ability to preserve generational knowledge through written language was the beginning nexus for developing what we consider formal education.
Prehistoric
Written language and writing tools have taken approximately 5,000 years of continued human technological innovation to bring us to the digital age. History is defined as “a chronological record of significant events, often including an explanation of their causes, a branch of knowledge that records past events, or the events themselves” (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). Prehistory is by definition prior to written records. Different peoples developed written language at different times, so a definitive end point of prehistory is relative to the peoples being discussed.
During the prehistoric period, fingers, shaped sticks, straw-like blowing tubes made of hollow bones or reeds, and carving tools were used to draw, incise, or stencil symbolic marks. The earliest known evidence of deliberate mark making are crosshatched incised chunks of red ochre found in the Blombos Cave in Africa dated approximately 77,000 years old (Gibbons, 2002; Henshilwood et al., 2009). At the same site, archaeologists discovered an ochre crayon drawing on a ground silcrete flake dated to approximately 73,000 years old (Henshilwood et al., 2018). The creation of this shaped ochre crayon is the first known writing tool.
Natural earth-based pigments were used, such as iron oxide (ochre) for red, yellow, and brown, manganese oxide or charcoal for black, and white from calcite or clay (Henshilwood et al., 2011). Pigments were ground and mixed with various binders, such as animal fat or bone marrow, plant sap, blood or saliva to adhere to natural stone surfaces (Henshilwood et al., 2011).
The act of making a persistent mark — stable across time, communicable across distance — represented a cognitive and technological revolution. It externalized memory. The hand, the finger, the sharpened bone or stone, and the ochre crayon were, in their time, as transformative as the tablet or the screen is in our generation (Henshilwood et al., 2018).
The Earliest Writing (8000 BCE – 3000 BCE)
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