11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey

The book The Language Puzzle delves into this a bit - even our closest genetic primate cousins appear to lack the physical adaptations in both brain and voice box/mouth to develop verbal language and written language is a step farther, other species show some signs like cetaceans and elephants. There’s a bit of speculation in there that advanced hand tools and language may have been coincident (from archaeological evidence with close time stamps) and that still took a very long time.

Probably happened on wood, which wasn’t preserved

We can presume with near certainty that there are vast quantities of lost artifacts from lost civilizations of early humans that were crafted from organic matter that have just deteriorated to dust. We say "Stone Age" only because stone artifacts are the only to survive. You can assume there were orders of magnitude more and more sophisticated artifacts and art works made from wood or mud or skins that are just gone forever. It's also entirely possible some of those artifacts contained something akin to written language but whatever it was is long gone.

they have found tally markers on bones and other objects like that, so yeah you would be correct, i guess it really comes down to what "writing" is i guess?

> The original caretakers of the Australian continent have been telling the same stories orally for 40,000 years.

I know that this is commonly believed, but how could you possibly know?

What are some good books or websites where one can read these stories? I am interested in learning more about them.

> the same stories orally for 40,000 years

How is this confirmed without records?

> I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.

It's due to the historiography of western civilization that for so long always traced its origins back to Greece (and Cleopatra was, of course, Greek.)

Compare to Mesopotamia, Sumer mentioned by the parent comment. There may be more surviving cuneiform literature than Greek and Latin. The sheer volume is kind of hard to overstate. The Library of Ashurbanipal is a prime find but hardly the only one of its kind: 30,000 tablets including mostly-complete copies of epic poems, histories, dictionaries, and thousands of administrative and personal letters. And there's millions more tablets from thousands of other digs.

And the crates and crates and crates of ordinary shipping receipts, if ever systematically studied, offer the potential to understand their society in ways we never will with classical antiquity.

But most haven't been read. There aren't enough people who know Sumerian and Akkadian (and all the other languages written in cuneiform over its 3000 year history) and how to read cuneiform for the task to translate them all to be completed in our lifetimes.

Stories of Mesopotamia do not always resonate. In fact they are often very alien and inscrutable. It's very hard to grasp the Mesopotamian mind. I'm unsure if this is lack of familiarity or because they really were so different, because in the western tradition they are the canonical Eastern Other, and shrouded with thousands of years of myth and misunderstanding.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the strangeness, I found reading translations of Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis to be revelatory and hope that my descriptions don't put anyone off. They're worth it. To this day "Babylon" has all sorts of associations, many of them unsavory. Which is rather unfair to them.

The Babylonians had 360 degrees in their circles, 24 hours in their days, and when they looked up at the stars they saw patterns like the Twins (what the Greeks would borrow as Gemini), the Bull of Heaven (Taurus), and the Crawfish (Cancer), the Hebrew month of Tammuz is named after the Sumerian fertility god Dumuzid, and the Mesopotamians leave many other echoes in the later cultures, now that we know to look.

There was still a wooly mammoth population on Wrangel Island in the Artic when the pyramids were built. They didn't go extinct until several hundred years later.

https://www.theglobalwow.com/mammoths-alive-during-pyramids/

There were archeologists in ancient Egypt studying ancient(er?) Egypt.

>I guess Cleopatra feels somewhat 'close' to us due to the surviving literary and archeological artifacts from the Roman empire.

Shakespeare wrote a play about her and Elizabeth Taylor played her in a movie. The effect of modern media is 99% of the reason why Cleopatra feels more "contemporary" than, say, Hatshepsut (for whom plenty of artifacts exist) or even Nefertiti.

Given that they went to considerable effort to carve it in stone as part of a temple complex, it was likely neither juvenile nor perverse

This is most likely the explanation. Apex predators will often try to kill the seed of an enemy by tearing off their junk. It's much less dangerous than trying to kill the enemy, and it serves the same purpose of ending their genetic line.

I'm not sure I would call that riding. With all the poses I suspect this was some odd-ball cult practice. I'm sure the archaeologist who had to polish that knob on that anthropomorphic figure in that one panel #3 has some good stories. Probably significant that its the smoothest part of that figure.

The old joke about what they call a chicken fucker in Oklahoma comes to mind here except I think those pre-Turks were cavorting with leopards.

They have this standard icon for leopard. That's an example of it. It's like our Mickey Mouse isn't exactly anatomically correct either.