India, April 25 -- History is said to date to the first records about our species; everything before that is even more apocryphal, shrouded in the mists of prehistory.

Writing is what made the difference. And what a storehouse of information, emotion and biographical detail those early records are. At first, it was mainly data being preserved: accounts, stores, censuses of people and livestock, rules for traders, citizens and administrators. But even these tell intriguing stories.

Among the earliest surviving pieces of writing is a sort of bar tab.

About 5,300 years ago, in the city of Uruk in present-day Iraq, a man named Kushim was in charge of a storage facility that contained nine cereals set aside for the making of beer, which was...