We also know that groups without writing systems were historically able to adopt writing systems rather quickly, which is, I think, rather good evidence that writing is a technology, not a point of speciation.
Going back to Ancient Greece, Socrates didn't even believe in the effectiveness of writing for communication of knowledge. My poetry professor used to spend some time on this, because it's intimately tied to the art of poetry. He would cite a number of studies showing our emotional responses are intimately tied to our language processing, and that humans are wired to emotionally respond to, and remember, stories.
Even before writing, oral histories were passed down for many generations. For an extreme example, see: https://www.sapiens.org/language/oral-tradition/ .
I won't pretend to know what makes us human, but ultimately I believe it has to be rooted in something neurological, not technological.
In terms of intelligence, yes, but in terms of what we've achieved then "technology" such as writing/archiving certainly has made a massive difference, else we'd be limited to what could be built by passing down oral history and skills passed from one generation to the next, much like Aboriginal Australians.
I suspect that the neurological (& vocal) differences that make us more intelligent than other apes are likely extremely few - more like "fine tuning" differences than anything major.
Given that with exception of an interesting knot-encoded (Quipu) system for some period of the Inca empire, the entire human population of the Americas (at least 15-20% of the total human population) fits this description, the answer seems to be "no". These cultures built huge cities (among the largest in the world at the time), used sophisticated irrigation schemes, ceramics technology and more.
The Maya though absolutely had "full writing" at least during the classical phase around 200 - 800 AD, and their writing probably derived from the older Olmec system. The Maya system worked much like classical Japanese or ancient Egyptian, and uses a mix of ideographs and purely phonetic symbols. They could, and did, write anything they could say. There are historical accounts of battles and names and etc. given in monumental inscriptions. And it is almost certain during the classical era that the Maya had full literature, with stories, mythology, histories, anthologies, religious scripture, etc. There were probably still priests who could read the Maya system when the Spanish arrived - one Jesuit recorded notes that indicate some of the phonetic values of some of the symbols correctly! - but they were mostly killed and most of the codices burned by the conquistadors.
It was not deciphered again until the 1970s and it's sadly still not widely appreciated that Mesoamerica had literate civilizations.
Fun fact: The Maya were such good astronomers and record-keepers that we have exact date alignment, which we have neither for Ancient Egypt or for Mesopotamia. For example any dates in Assyrian records are subject to a ~40 year window of uncertainty for exactly when they occurred. There is no such ambiguity for the Maya: Pacal the Great almost certainly died on August 29, 683.