I understand that the red, yellow and green lines give a general idea of how bad traffic is on a road, but do they have any specific meaning, like red equals a 40-minute wait at a toll bridge? a. According to the Google Maps site, the colored lines representing traffic conditions on major highways refer to the speed at which one can travel on that road.
The oldest form of writing known to man is Cuneiform used in Mesopatamia.
An extreme case is the Vedic Sanskrit of the Rigveda: the earliest parts of this text may date to c. 1500 BC, while the oldest known manuscript dates to the 11th century AD, a gap of over 2,500 years.