Throughout Homo sapiens' 200,000(ish)-year-old story on this planet, a few key innovations transformed this simple member of the Great Ape family into the intellectual powerhouse of the modern world. Fire was a big one and wheels certainly helped, but nothing quite revolutionized human learning -- and by extension human knowledge -- than the written word.

Scholars know that the first writing systems, Mesopotamia's cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics, developed more than 5,000 years ago, but these were symbol-based languages. Many modern languages today rely on an alphabet, a series of symbols that instead represent phonemes rather than entire words or ideas. This kind of writing system came thousands of years later, and the story goes that the earliest alphabet -- known as Proto-Sinaitic script -- developed in the Sinai peninsula, which transformed some Egyptian hieroglyphics into a phonetic script.

However, archaeologists from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Amsterdam, are complicating that narrative, as a discovery of four finger-like tablets in a tomb in Umm-el Marra, an ancient city in Syria, shows evidence of a proto-alphabet some 500 years before the linguistic advancements in the Sinai Peninsula. These tablets were initially unearthed back in 2004, and John Hopkins' archaeologist Glenn Schwartz included an illustration of the tablets in a preliminary report in 2006. Four years later, Schwartz was convinced that the history of alphabetic writing needed some editing, but his ideas didn't find an eager audience.

"It seems like such an outlier," Schwarz said at the time. "All the other evidence favors Semitic speakers in Egypt in the Middle Bronze Age. So to have Syria and the Early Bronze Age, it's just so wacky that they can't believe it."

Finally, Schwarz's research appears to be gaining wider traction after presenting his findings at the annual meeting of the American Society of Overseas Research in Boston earlier this year.

"Alphabets revolutionized writing by making it accessible to people beyond royalty and the socially elite," Schwartz said in a press statement. "Alphabetic writing changed the way people lived, how they thought, how they communicated. And this new discovery shows that people were experimenting with new communication technologies much earlier and in a different location than we had imagined before now."

Schwarz describes Umm-el Marra as one of the first medium-sized urban centers in Syria, and these small clay tablets were found in a tomb containing six skeletons, cookware, pottery, and spearheads. Carbon-14 dating confirmed that these little bits of alphabet were dated to around 2400 BCE.

"The cylinders were perforated, so I'm imagining a string tethering them to another object to act as a label," Schwartz said in the press statement. "Maybe they detail the contents of a vessel, or maybe where the vessel came from, or who it belonged to. Without a means to translate the writing, we can only speculate."

For now, experts have only a very small sample of the alphabetic writing system, so it's difficult to discern exactly how expansive this system would have been. Hopefully future excavations around the region will help rewrite the story of the written word.

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