The Brazilian nun, who was born in 1908, was recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's oldest person in January ... Lucas' order called her "a symbol of wisdom, faith, and unconditional ...

The appearance of an alphabetic symbol in this context suggests that certain sectors of the population possessed knowledge of writing and were capable of using it for practical or symbolic purposes.

This dispute is just one of many such little-known events; for example, another debate has been raging for centuries over who invented the symbol for ... to find the oldest instances of 0 in ...