Reading, Writing, and History

One of the things I sometimes discuss with the students I tutor is the fact that reading and writing are fairly new for humans. We didn't evolve (in the prehistorical sense) to do these things, because they weren't part of the environment we evolved to survive—but they are very much part of the environment we live in today, very much a survival requirement. mount_oregano touches on this briefly, when she notes, "Speaking is instinctive, but writing is a technology: a code," in the opening line of her informative and enjoyable post about the ways in which writing has developed to support the ways in which people read.