#random fact

Alligators can live up to 80 years old.

Day 181

Writing was invented independently at least 4 times in human history (that we know of).

The first time was in Ancient Mesopotamia (in what is now Iran) about 5,000 years ago, where people wrote on clay tablets in cuneiform, a script that uses the edge of a stylus to make triangular markings on wet clay:

However, cuneiform didn't start out looking like a series of short and long triangles.

Proto-cuneiform was a lot less abstract. Writing in Mesopotamia started out for keeping track of goods, so early writing was mostly drawings of the goods being traded, stored, and used.