Besides cuneiform, there are some other candidates for ancient scripts, like Proto-Sinaitic.
The general idea today is that writing was invented independently on three different continents: the Middle East, Mesoamerica and China. And that the cuneiform of ancient Sumeria is the oldest of all writing systems.
But is this really the case? Cuneiform writing has survived in a way by chance, because the Sumerians and other peoples chose to write on clay tablets. It is possible that people also wrote on other surfaces and in systems that have been lost or have not yet been discovered.
Most ancient peoples attribute the invention and the ‘gift’ of writing to a special god. It was considered something divine, a very special thing. There has to be a very special explanation, because it is curious how writing emerged in different places in the world, after million years of illiteracy.
It is said that writing systems were first used to note numbers, for example in trading transactions. So for practical and mathematical purposes. But what about the pyramid builders? Some say that they are over 10,000 years old. Whoever built them must have had some form of writing during the constructions works. What writing system did the pyramid builders use to plan, draw and build the pyramids?
Does everything really begin with cuneiform and hieroglyphs? Is this really the oldest writing system, or were there even older systems? Was there one root writing system from which all systems have developed? Delivered to man by the gods? Until someone discovers it, we have to wait and see.