I wonder if there are any linguistic historians on this board who know anything about how and "why" ideographic writing systems developed vis-a-vis alphabetic writing, and how this might have affected relative historical development. A question which particularly interests me - which was the first Chinese characters, or character? My conjecture is that it must have been "death" but this is entirely speculative.
With the exception of Korean, every alphabetic system in the world is based on the old Phoenician alphabet, so from a straight genealogical perspective, alphabetic systems are a tiny, unique minority that has happened to be deliriously succesful.
As for Chinese, the earliest character is far too granular a question for us to answer. The earliest extended corpus we have is the Oracle Bone Script of the Middle Bronze Age, which corresponds to the semi-historical Shang Dynasty. There are a variety of potential Neolithic predecessors, however, the most famous and earliest being the Jiahu characters, but these are all highly controversial and it is uncertain whether they are an actual script, let along being predecessors to Hanzi.
The problem with tracing the decent of Chinese characters is bamboo and, to a lesser extent, silk. Bamboo is plentiful, easily harvested and processed, and it makes an excellent writing surface. Unfortunately, anything written on bamboo is, ipso facto, not written on baked clay tablets, stone, or some other surface that preserves. So unlike Mesopotamian cuneiform, we simply do not have the sort of extensive, ancient and largely non-perishable corpus of writings.