Randy D. McCracken, age 14, of Kernersville, N.C., for his question:

WHAT IS MAN'S OLDEST WRITTEN MESSAGE?

Sometime before 3000 B.C. the Sumerians who lived in the southern part of Mesopotamia became the first people to reach the stage of primitive writing. They had symbols for items and numbers but had difficulty with writing abstract ideas.

About 3000 B.C. the Egyptians developed the wordsyllabic system of writing called hieroglyphics.

Then about 1300, B.C. the Chinese began writing a highly developed form. Where the writers of the middle East had only a few hundred word signs, the Chinese had as many as 50,000 different ones. The early Chinese even had signs for the syllables in proper names and in foreign words.