One hundred generations

As a writer and (especially) as a writing teacher, I am fascinated by the way Harold J. Morowitz expresses how recent an invention writing is:

Formal pictographic writing probably goes back over 5,000 years, to be followed by syllabic writing in the Fertile Crescent. After the development of writing, there was constant intercultural exchange among the various societies. A fully alphabetic writing seems to have developed in Greece about 2,800 years ago, and the system has become almost universal. This is only 100 generations into the past (Emergence of Everything, 168, emphasis mine).

After chapters featuring numbers in the millions and even billions, the number one hundred is petty cash. One hundred is a number I can get my mind around. And the fact that we went from the first alphabetic writing to Shakespeare in fewer than ninety generations, and to James Joyce and the World Wide Web in about a hundred, astonishes me.

I also realize that it's no wonder writing is so hard. We've just now begun learning how to do it.