It's not that simple.

I'm an amature historian with an interest in the early middle east (where writing is said to have been first invented). I'm not a PhD, so you'll have to excuse me if my answer is a bit lacking in scholarly jargon. I'm sure someone far more qualified than myself will give you a better answer soon. This answer is intened to be a quick-and-dirty explanation of why we can be fairly certain that writing first developed in Mesopotamia between 3400-3100 BC or in Egypt around 3250 BC.

First, we need to define what we mean by "writing." If you want to be pedantic, "writing" is simply a manmade picture or marking with some sort of linguistic meaning associated with it. Under this rather liberal use of the term, one could argue that cave paintings could be classified as a form of "writing," since the animals depicted in them likely had some sort of vocalized word associated with them... which is obviously a useless definition.

So we need to rigidly define what we mean by "writing." When we do that, we come up with a set of criteria which include things like the adoption abstractions between symbols, sounds, and meanings; simplification of intricate pictures to symbolic and approxamate shapes; the rebus principle; etc.

Armed with these criteria, we can now look at our earliest examples of "writing" and see something quite interesting...

I'm not an egyptologist. So I can only speak about the middle east. But there is a clear progression from very "picture"like tokens of identification (basically a clay seal with the imprint of a picture of grain stalk or ox head on it) which were used when transporting and trading goods across Mesopotamia and more complex forms of "writing." Many of these very early symbols were just simplified pictures of oxen or stalks of grain made to be representative of their real life counterparts. This enabled scribes and merchants to keep track of large numbers of goods and animals without having to count everything any time they needed to trade or move them.

Most scholars don't consider these tokens to be true "writing." Most would consider these tokens as a form of "accounting by pictures"—a form of proto-writing lacking grammar, phonology, and basically any use beyond accounting. Proto-writing is just a more practical application of cave art.

"Writing" as we know it only truely evolves with the invention of the rebus system. The rebus system is a way of reading the "pictures" as symbols for sounds rather than strict 2d representations of real world objects. For example, say we have a simple picture of a human (something like this >->○). Let'd assume this symbol was originally a simple picture that simply meant the concept of "human." Let's also assume that when a scribe drew this symbol, he was doing something like counting people. Maybe he was compilinga simple early census, drawing troops up for a muster, or counting the people in this village for tax purposes, etc.

However, with the rebus principle, suddenly that symbol of a human with no meaning beyond "human" starts to be used to indicate the sound of it's initial sound "hum." Iterating on this process over generations upon generations eventually produces a dictonary which enables scribes to to use ">->○" in a whole plethora of words from humor to humidifier, but not words like humble or humming because the sound is different (even though they are spelled the same in english).

It is a bunch of these incrimental adaptations of simple symbols to cover sounds and abstract meanings that give us the most clear indication of when a library of symbols becomes "writing".

In Mesopotamia, this happened around 3,400 bc. Any earlier, and the symbols don't really have any semantic meaning other than to represent themselves. Although new discoveries push this date back bit by bit, they are generally of dubious enough complexity to call them "writing."

Also, there is a grey area between when these symbols first became abstractions and when they became useful for forming complex thoughts. It is the time between these two occurancrs where scholars discuss the origin of writing.

Cave paintings > simple pictures > rebus principle > simple writing

I hope that helped.

Sorry for any grammar or spelling mistakes, on mobile.

Source: Age of Agade, Benjamin Foster.

Piggy backing on this question since it is closely related; what is the current consensus on the emergence of Brahmi? What was the transmission route (and how sure are we that it was a transmission)? (Especially in the light of the discovery at Anuradhapura?)

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I would say that the story is much more complicated than is implied by u/UpvoteDownvoteHelper here, and argue that yes, there is a very real possibility - and in some cases an overwhelming likelihood - that the emergence of writing significantly pre-dates our earliest evidence for it.

Preliminary Remarks: The Inadequacy of Monogenesis

First things first, we should take care to clarify a very important historical point: monogenesis (according to which writing emerged only once in the world, probably in the Ancient Near East, and then spread to other regions) can no longer be regarded as a serious hypothesis. At the very least, it is ridiculous to suppose that the written traditions of Mesoamerica were somehow diffused from the Near East: there are two very large oceans in the way. It is, furthermore, also generally accepted that writing emerged in China independently of its Near Eastern antecedents, although in that case the possibility of trans-cultural diffusion are perhaps somewhat more plausible. The fact that writing must have emerged more than once complicates the question of how 'old' writing is, because the answer depends greatly on which system of writing one is referring to. Of course, one could just focus on the very earliest case at which it emerged (which is indeed very likely to be in Sumer), but as far as I'm concerned to do so would be rather arbitrary and pointless: if writing has emerged in several locations completely independently of each other, then who cares which of them happens to have come first?

With the recognition of the inadequacy of monogenesis, I believe that a far more felicitous approach than parochial focus on Sumer is to instead analyse the emergence of writing in comparative perspective. To that end, I will take my cue from Volume 3 of The Cambridge World History, subtitled Early Cities in Comparative Perspective: 4000 BCE - 1200 CE. More specifically, in Part II of that Volume ("Early cities and information technologies") compare the use of information technologies by the people of four different cultural traditions: Sumer, China, the Mayans, and the Inka. The use of the term "information technologies" instead of writing is deliberate and important, because the Inka (and Andean civilisation generally) are not traditionally regarded as having possessed a system of writing - indeed, the fact that they were able to administer such an empire and possess so many of the hallmarks of what is traditionally called 'civilisation' without a system of writing has often been one of the major sources of academic fascination with the Inka. What they did have, which they had inherited from a long line of antecedent cultures in the Andes, was the ability to store information using a knotted cord technology known as the khipu. Exactly how much information they were able to convey is unclear, since the ability to read them has been lost (and, to no small extent, purposefully extinguished) in the aftermath of the Spanish Conquest. Nevertheless, the accounts of Conquistadors such as Cieza de Leon (~1520-1554) do describe some of the uses to which they were put, including tribute and census records, which does at least allow us to make some sorts of estimates. Regardless of whether or not this is to be a regarded as a full-blown tradition of writing, its usage for purposes traditionally associated with writing means that a serious inquiry into the origins of writing should pay careful attention to it and if one is looking to provide some sort of theory about how writing emerges then one should be able to make sense of it.

The Traditional Narrative: The Case of Sumer

As previously indicated, it is very likely that the earliest tradition of writing to have emerged is that of the Sumerians, and bearing that in mind it is perhaps unsurprising that this is the case to which the greatest quantity of attention has been devoted. The traditional narrative, aptly summarised by u/UpvoteDownvoteHelper, holds that writing emerged as the result of a very slow and gradual process in order to meet the administrative needs of the government of the city of Uruk. To put it very crudely, over the course of the fourth millennium BCE the population of Uruk grew to levels that until that point completely unprecedented in human history - typically cited to be around 50,000 by the end of the millennium - and that the associated necessity for record-keeping led eventually to the development of cuneiform.

In the case of Sumer, this is indeed a fairly well-supported theory, as indicated by the clearly identifiable development over time of increasingly fine-grained distinctions and replacement of iconic by symbolic representation, leading into proto-cuneiform and through it to cuneiform. The theory also has a very important conceptual appeal: it breaks down the emergence of writing into several comparatively minor steps, enabling us to make sense of this emergence without supposing any sudden or miraculous strokes of genius. It is this fact, I believe, that explains why the Sumerian narrative is just so compelling, and plays a key role in ensuring its continued popularity. It is also for this reason that writing in Egypt, which lacks a clearly identifiable antecedent tradition of record-keeping, has usually been regarded as a cultural import from Sumer - even though the earliest surviving Egyptian writing is virtually contemporaneous with early Sumerian writing. One could dispute the significance of this conceptual appeal, especially if one keeps in mind well-known historical cases (e.g. Sequoyah, Shong Lue Yang) of people from non-literate societies independently developing systems of writing. On the other hand, one could dispute the significance of such cases, since they almost by definition refer to people in relatively close contact with literate societies, who are therefore much more likely to be aware of the possibility and uses of a system of writing.