Eurasia. The invention of alphabetic writing in the Fertile Crescent spread fairly rapidly to the rest of the Eurasian continent, particularly to Europe, North Africa (Carthage), and India. Here too (as with the wheel, cultivation, and livestock farming), the situation in the Americas was drastically different, due to significant natural barriers: the North American deserts, the continent’s north-south expansion, with its very different climates, the Isthmus of Panama combined with the dense tropical forest. All this meant that the writing system invented in Mesoamerica (Mexico) in 500 BC never reached the Andes, and thus the Incas, over the next two thousand years.
