The SNJ columnist Karen Eberhardt-Shelton was born in California but grew up in England.

She now lives in Stroud and is currently working on an education project called Learn, Think, Act and is hoping to develop an eco-community land trust.

Her thought-provoking columns will focus on how we all have to take responsibility for our actions and for our planet.

CAVE paintings, the Dead Sea Scrolls, pictographs, hieroglyphics, cuneiform – human history before books.

The Hebrew Bible, Greek Illiad, Hindu Mahabharata and Buddhist Tipitika all began as oral works. For many generations, theyre were transmitted orally and would have lived on even had writing never been invented.

Between 3,000BC and 2,500BC, more and more signs were added to the Sumerian system (it was the Mesopotamians who eventually started to write things down, gradually transforming into a full script, cuneiform).

Without the written word and methods of preserving it, history wouldn’t exist.

Language triumphed long before writing. Written language was the product of an agrarian society, and when communities grew bigger as a result of more food being produced, there had to be a way of keeping track of what came and went, who owed what to whom and versions of that numerical stuff we’re obsessed with today.

Most importantly though, when humans die, their brains die with them, so without the invention of language and writing, nearly everything we were and did would have vanished too.

In the temple of bureaucracy, files have to be kept because of the masses of information, and people who manage all that can’t think randomly and creatively; their minds have to focus on structuring and organisation. The impact of script on human history has gradually changed the way humans think and see the world; what do we have now?

Compartmentalism and bureaucracy in control, arts on the sideline. That’s why I’m so anti-maths and uncomfortable with the numerical approach to nearly everything we do.

I’m an old-fashioned type homo sapiens, happiest in the embrace of nature. I feel the ancient DNA in my brain wriggling to practise encoded biological principles, a natural way to cook, wash, use sunlight, grow food, be familiar with what I brush past in the woods and meadows.

Even though most of my brain is filled with modern information, it still twitches with codes and patterns passed on by my long-gone ancestors that would be useful today.