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The oldest known cave paintings date back over 35,000 years, with examples like the animal depictions in Chauvet Cave, France (32,000 - 30,000 BP) and hand stencils in Maltravieso Cave, Spain (over 64,000 years old).3 The tradition continued until around 11,600 BP with the paintings at Le Portel cave in France.4 -
Cuneiform script, one of the earliest writing systems, emerged in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) around 3500 BC. -
The Egyptian hieroglyphic script is one of the oldest writing systems, with inscriptions dating back to around 3200 BC during the early literate period of ancient Egyptian history. -
The tradition of hand-written and illuminated manuscripts flourished in the Middle Ages, with beautifully decorated religious texts produced by monks from around 500 AD onwards. -
Johannes Gutenberg's printing press, introduced in the 1440s, revolutionized book production and enabled widespread dissemination of information. -
The electrical telegraph, allowing long-distance communication through coded messages over wires, was developed in the 1830s and 1840s. -
The earliest commercial motion picture films were produced in the late 1890s, pioneered by the Lumière brothers and Thomas Edison among others. -
Guglielmo Marconi invented the first radio system capable of transmitting signals in 1895. -
The first working television system was demonstrated in the late 1920s, with regular broadcasts starting in the 1930s. -
The first programmable computers were developed in the 1930s and 1940s, with ENIAC being one of the earliest general-purpose electronic computers in 1946. -
AI research began in the 1950s, but the field has seen major advancements in recent decades with machine learning, neural networks, and applications like virtual assistants. -
The first home video game consoles, like the Magnavox Odyssey, were released in the early 1970s, marking the beginning of the video game industry. -
The modern Internet grew out of the ARPANET network developed in the 1960s, but became widely available to the public in the late 1980s and 1990s with the World Wide Web.