Olmec time-travellers?
'Oldest' New World writing found, saith the headline. The BBC article then begins:
Ancient civilisations in Mexico developed a writing system as early as 2,000 years ago, new evidence suggests.
Okay, I'll buy that. Offhand I wouldn't have known whether existing Maya/Olmec/Toltec/Zapotec texts went back that far or who got there first. Later it says:
The finding suggests that New World people developed writing some 400 years before their contemporaries in the Western hemisphere.
This I am puzzled by. After repeated rereadings, I have decided it can be made sense of if you assume that by 'contemporary' they don't mean 'contemporary'. I first (and second, and third) read it as comparing to their contemporaries in some other hemisphere (e.g. the Romans of that period), except for the part about 'Western'. But now I think they meant '400 years before other [non-contemporary] people in the Western hemisphere', specifically, the Olmecs or whoever of 400 CE, authors of the hitherto earliest New World writing. The writing is on a slab. A bit later we read:
The slab has been dated to the early first millennium BC.
So did they keep the slab lying around for some nine hundred years or so before writing on it? Or is this more editing gone mad?
Ancient civilisations in Mexico developed a writing system as early as 2,000 years ago, new evidence suggests.
Okay, I'll buy that. Offhand I wouldn't have known whether existing Maya/Olmec/Toltec/Zapotec texts went back that far or who got there first. Later it says:
The finding suggests that New World people developed writing some 400 years before their contemporaries in the Western hemisphere.
This I am puzzled by. After repeated rereadings, I have decided it can be made sense of if you assume that by 'contemporary' they don't mean 'contemporary'. I first (and second, and third) read it as comparing to their contemporaries in some other hemisphere (e.g. the Romans of that period), except for the part about 'Western'. But now I think they meant '400 years before other [non-contemporary] people in the Western hemisphere', specifically, the Olmecs or whoever of 400 CE, authors of the hitherto earliest New World writing. The writing is on a slab. A bit later we read:
The slab has been dated to the early first millennium BC.
So did they keep the slab lying around for some nine hundred years or so before writing on it? Or is this more editing gone mad?