"State media say researchers identified more than 2,000 pictorial symbols dating back 8,000 years, on cliff faces in the north-west of the country."

"They say many of these symbols bear a strong resemblance to later forms of ancient Chinese characters."

"Scholars had thought Chinese symbols came into use about 4,500 years ago."

"The Damaidi carvings, first discovered in the 1980s, cover 15 sq km (5.8 square miles) and feature more than 8,000 individual figures including the sun, moon, stars, gods and scenes of hunting or grazing."

While this is very exciting, I am very skeptical of this. What is considered "writing" must illustrate replication of human speech. Just individual figures on a cliff face without any coherent structure like sentences or texts does not mean that the symbols represented writing. They can be considered "pre-writing", such as accounting tokens in Mesopotamia and Olmec iconography in Mesoamerica, or as "petroglyphs" commonly found in North America, Africa, and Australia.