To the question whether or not the ancient Ainu had a writing system

The question about the writing system of the Ainu, the indigenous inhabitants of Hokkaido and in the past of the Kuril islands and Sakhalin, has been discussed in academia for two and a half centuries. The Ainu language was assigned to the group of non-written languages, and the first records of its words and folklore samples were made in Cyrillic and latin. Currently, the graphic form of the Japanese katakana is used to write Ainu words. Nevertheless, from time to time articles appear in magazines and on the internet that claim that the ancient Ainu had a writing system. This article attempts to present a new view of this problem by analyzing the hypotheses that were generated in the past, as well as new data and the results of modern research.