Sure but what I am struggling to understand here is that these sets of communication elements must have been generated in the first place by the animals that use them, so this resolves nothing really. Is there something I am missing here?

Red, though? Blood. The colour might vary a bit, but nowhere as much. Black? Soot. White? Clouds, chalk. It’s simply easier to generate points of reference for those.

Too true and makes sense, but what confuses and vexes me is the idea that “yellow” would predate “blue”: Blue things include bodies of water and the sky (assuming the azure/cyan and royal blue/standard blue are the same color), but what important thing is there that is yellow that we need to talk about so urgently? Blue comes up with some foods, but it is rare and other natural phenomena like colors of a night sky, but I’m struggling to think of the reason why we needed “yellow” prior to that. Any conjecture?

This is elder abuse.

the Committee saw no pressure to introduce a phonetic system for Mandarin

This is particularly interesting to me: where did you get this?

Thanks for the thorough comment.

Easy/hard in which aspect? And how do we even measure it?

I’m confused as to if you read the article, since you point out Chinese characters later. Did you?

Similarly, Cherokee syllabary and Hangul for Korean. The former was even created by someone who was himself illiterate!

How is this a meme?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tankie&ia=web