The need to convey ideas other than sound through words has led early man to discover visual means to communicate. The earliest form of visual communication were body signs and gestures. In time, man learned to express his ideas into art forms such as illustrations and cave wall paintings of animals depicting his earliest source of food and means of living through hunting.

As an inevitable economic progress came as a consequence to man’s discovery of farming and animal domestication, the need to preserve his ideas and other discoveries led to his discovery of writing.

Writing which is the preservation of and the preserved text on a medium, with the use of signs or symbols is to be distinguished from illustrating such as cave drawings and paintings.

Writing is the most important discovery that man ever achieved for it is through this that man preserved and handed down his knowledge for the next generation resulting to the modern societies that we have at present.

Historically, the earliest form of writing began during the time of the Mesopotamian people on 4000 BC which was a system of clay tokens representing objects or pictographs. By 3100 BC, this method of preserving records evolved into a system using a round-shaped stylus pressed into soft clay and by 2800 BC further evolved into a wedge-shaped stylus known as cuneiform which survived until 75 AD which at that time has already evolved into an ideographic system.

In China, discoveries of tortoise-shell carvings dating back to 6000 BC if deemed to be a written language would predate the Mesopotamian cuneiform for about 2000 years.

The Egyptian form of writing called the Heiroglyphics was dated to 3200 BC.

Today, writing system worldwide is being classified into six types which are:
1. Logographic ( Chinese characters ) from the word logogram which is a single written character representing a complete grammatical word.
2. Syllabic ( Japanese kana ) from the word syllabary which is a set of written symbols that represent or approximate syllables which make up words.
3. Alphabetic ( Latin alphabet ) from the word alphabet which is a small set of letters
( basic written symbols ) each of which roughly represents or represented historically a phoneme of a spoken language.
4. Abugida ( Indian Devanagan ) which is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one.
5. Abjad ( Arabic alphabet ) which is an alphabetic writing system where there is one symbol per consonant and no vowel representation.
6. Featural ( Korean hangul ) script represents finer detail than an alphabet.

The discovery of farming is the beginning of man’s progress. It is through this activity that the domestication of animals was also discovered which hastened food production through the use of beasts of burden and meat and dairy production. This in turn prompted early man to totally leave behind his previous means of living which was hunting.

It is through this period that man’s lifestyle incurred a radical change from its former nomadic hunting activities to agriculturally inclined means of living. This freed him from being so entangled with his primary source of food which were the migratory herds of beasts and thus give him time to experiment and discover many important ideas and materials which give rise to various fields of endeavors collectively contributing to humanity’s progress.

Farming as a means of living started in the later part of the Stone Age or the Neolithic period (New Stone Age), being characterized by its use of polished stone axes and simple pottery.

Agriculture or the production of food through the systematic raising of plants and animals which rise as a result to the discovery of farming and animal domestication began in the Near East on 8000 BC and spread to Northern Europe by the 4th millennium BC.

From those early time onwards it became the central element of human history as its progress has been a crucial factor in worldwide socio-economic change due to an inevitable proliferation of the wealth-building and militaristic specializations rarely seen in previous cultures brought upon by the freedom to engage and devote time to other projects other than food production which by then has contributed to an excess of food beyond the needs of families thereby freeing many individuals to develop and experiment various fields of activities.

One of the most important milestone in the history of mankind is the discovery or discernment about the effects of heat which led to the invention of various methods and tools of making and sustaining fire.

Fire has many uses and one is that it is the most essential factor behind the survival, growth and advancement of humankind. Fire produces heat necessary in processing ores to produce metals which are the basic tools and building materials in our advanced society aside from being primarily a very necessary element in our daily culinary efforts for a healthy living since majority of the world’s human population use heat in processing and preparing food for reasons of health and satisfaction.

Evidence are found in the African continent dating back as early as 1.5 million years about the deliberate human utilization of natural fires. These early attempts of exploitation of fire led to the development of the necessary skills, tools and techniques in fire-making.

Research about the techniques used by ancient people in various locations around the world through studies focused on ancient fire-making tools led to the realization that our modern methods of fire-making are not thoroughly different from ancient methods which are grounded primarily on three different processes but not totally unique techniques and one entirely distinct idea by utilizing solar heat:

1. Method of making fire through friction.
2. Way of creating fire through sparks.
3. Process of starting fire by way of chemical reaction.
4. The idea of starting fire by utilizing solar heat using ice lens.

Method of fire-making using friction.

Method of starting fire by solar heat using ice lens.