Comment by Nevermark

That was insightful re words.

Yes a two step.

Spoken words forced/helped us divide up completely fuzzy concepts into discretized hierarchies of less and less fuzzy concepts over time.

And then written symbols, enabled a trend of identifying more and more simple I.e “primitive” abstract concepts (culminating in true, false, 1, 2, 0, infinity, node, edge, …) that let us reformulate and better understand complex fuzzy concepts as compositions of primitive concepts.

Language and then pen/paper.