The Tărtăria tablets

Possibly the oldest writing on Earth, if anyone could prove where it was found

In 1961 a team led by Nicolae Vlassa of the National Museum of Transylvanian History reported finding, at a Neolithic site in the village of Tărtăria, three small unfired clay tablets scratched with signs, buried with 26 figurines, a shell bracelet and the burnt, broken bones of a woman. If the signs are writing and the tablets are as old as the site, around 5300 BC, they would be the oldest writing in the world, older than anything in Mesopotamia. Both ifs are fought over. Vlassa never described the layers they came from, some scholars think they slipped down from a later level, a recent claim calls them forgeries copied from Sumerian signs in popular books of the time, and Colin Renfrew doubts they are writing at all, since a sign for a goat looks like a goat in any culture. The museum made one question unanswerable when its conservators baked the tablets to preserve them, destroying any chance of radiocarbon dating them directly. The smallest is a disc 6 centimetres across with a hole drilled through it.