Tenenbaum and his colleagues set out to build an AI that could do something most humans can do easily: See a handwritten alphabet character, recognize it, and draw it themselves. To do this ...

The early writing appears to date to around 2400 B.C.—preceding the previous most bygone examples by roughly 500 years.

There are hundreds, maybe thousands of cuneiform signs," Schwartz told Newsweek. "But alphabetic characters only refer to the phonetic value of a sign—so the sound 'r' or 'l' or 'm,' etcetera ...

A few decades ago, researchers discovered four small clay cylinders marked with strange symbols at an ancient tomb in Syria. They’ve now concluded that those symbols are letters—and they may be the ...