> There was no proto-writing stage.

Sequoyah was a great man, a genius, no doubt... but I think it is important to note that he didn't go straight to an alphabet.

It was his third try.

The first go was logograms: he made up symbols for words. Then he realised this would be too complicated and hard to remember, which speaking as an adult who learned to write a few words of Chinese and Japanese, I fervently agree with.

Then his second go was ideograms: symbols for ideas instead. The problem is similar and he dismissed that, too.

His third try was the Cherokee syllabary: one symbol per syllable, similarly to Hiragana and Katakana for anyone else who suffered through beginner's Japanese.

In a way, I think this makes it considerably more impressive. He worked through millennia of the evolution of writing in a decade or so. It's astounding.

(And I can't read it, and I'm ashamed by that, but then I do not know a word of Cherokee and live on a different continent.)

Heh, that's a fun point. Maybe even a deep point. They don't have to leave a long trail of artifacts of incremental groping toward the concept of written language, starting with seal icons and tally marks and then account ledgers and then complaint letters. Instead, somebody could just have the idea, all of a sudden, if conditions are right to suggest it. Or several people could. But this raises the question of how big an idea it's possible for one person to have all at once, without handing it between multiple people in evolutionary stages. I guess there's no real limit on that, it's just that excellent ideas require excellent zeitgeist conditions (like the availability of paper that you mention).