We do know that art and other markings date tens of thousands of years before the first proto-writing. Writing is specifically about markings that form a language. So doodles and visual jokes (e.g. phalluses) wouldn't count. I don't know what you mean by notes, but writing notes without a language would be difficult I suspect.
But there could early languages that were written on organic materials. The main problem is there's a bootstrapping problem where you need to account for how the first one developed at all. After that you can continuously improve over time.
