Writing is a very recent invention, about 5-6kya for the oldest known script, and effectively one of the last inventions of the Neolithic package. We see urban developments that well predate writing; Catalhoyuk is something like 10kya, and that is roughly contemporary with the earliest domestication of crops and animals.
Even full on state-based civilization can happen in the absence of writing systems--Teotihuacan rather famously was not a literate society, even going so far as to exert hegemony over literate Mayan city-states and still not adopt any writing or proto-writing system. (There are also societies like the Wari and the Inca, which had quipu, themselves something that make you ask "what is a writing system?").
Isn't this going a bit too far? Sure they didn't have a modern writing system like Mayans, or even proto-writing systems like Inca's quipu but we do have hard evidence of Teotihuacan society communicating language with painted symbols (e.g. findings in La Ventilla). It's unclear to me how we can say they didn't leave writing to future generations (especially assuming probably there were a lot more stuff that was lost to time than we can see)
Also, this comment seems to slightly misunderstand what the GP said imho. Yes writing is a new invention, but e.g. paintings in Lascaux are about 17k years old. Which means even before Catalhoyuk level civilizations, humans were leaving symbols for later generations to look and decipher. This is the same "archival" process GP is talking about. Humans leave a message to future generations. It seems like our biology must prime us to do it, because we see it universally. Whether the messages we leave are writing, painting, music or whatever... humans still produce things for people that'll come after them. But animals are incapable of doing so, even if a Bonobo is roughly as intelligent as a human, it's not like it can transmit any kind of information to future generations, so every generation of Bonobos need to learn either from scratch or from their community. So, perhaps ironically, part of being human-smart is having human-precise hands that can paint/write. Without this ability, we end up like bonobos, elephants, dolphins etc perhaps smart but for all they know their parents were the Adam and Eve.
> But animals are incapable of doing so, even if a Bonobo is roughly as intelligent as a human, it's not like it can transmit any kind of information to future generations, so every generation of Bonobos need to learn either from scratch or from their community.
We just don't know if this is true.