The Cognitive Aspects of Chinese Character Processing

Archaeological excavations have unearthed pottery etchings that appear ancestral to the Chinese characters (e.g., the shell-and-bone logograph of some 3,400 years ago). Judging by the extent to which these logographs are already conventionalized, it is reasonable to infer that true writing emerged considerably earlier. This suggests that the earliest existing Chinese writing dates back at least some 6,000 years.(1)