This is a part-spoof part-real page of stuff about Ancient Stickman.  It started as a joke page about stick cavemen and then I accidentally got interested in it.

Stone Age people were cool.  They invented, discovered, survived and a whole lot of things that Modern Man has mostly forgotten.

Could you make a flint tool, hunt a mammoth or build Stonehenge?

Me neither.

Although this page is an expert look at the Stone Age it also requires some simple puns.

This will appeal to modern cavemen who may not have scientific knowledge or much intelligence at all.

Here we are.


Bud Light before rebrand - coprolite
cave party went quiet - stony silence
caveman rides a sabre tooth tiger - cave-a-lier

celebrity caveman - rock star
cute pet for the ancients - cavy
dozy Neanderthal - homo reclinus

early communication device - Apple iStone
have a night off - go clubbing
inventing fire - first arsonist

keeps hitting people - homo slapiens
stone age hedgehogs - hengehogs
stony broke - skinflint

take selfies with a mobile bone
trading produce - mammoth sale
upset caveman - pre hysteric

Archaeologists dig up stuff and write very long books about it.  

You can volunteer to go on a weekend dig and use a toothbrush to excavate a pit.  ​Sometimes they discover a bone or a pot which sends them into raptures and annoys the Creationists.

​Archaeology man.  Dig it!

Recent archaeological finds in the Aztec area have unearthed what appeared to be markings from a felt-tip pen.

On closer examination by someone doing a degree they have turned out to be the first known relics of an ancient stickman or Homo Stickus as he may now be called.

​With the possibility of a government research grant for investigating the Stick Period it must be time to get digging.

Since I started writing this fascinating piece yet more old stuff has been dug up somewhere.  This time it is an Aztec calendar featuring the months of the year and the great stick god himself.

Some archaeological types are saying the months of the year were not invented until Roman times.

Like they know anything!  How else would the Aztecs know when to plant their potatoes?

​​No one knows why their god poked his tongue out.  It may be simple rudeness or an underlying asthmatic problem.
 
This fascinating relic will be on display at a museum once they have given it a good clean-up.

It is not clear why ancient man felt the need to make so much broken pottery.

Archaeologists are always finding it buried in ruins or just laying around in trenches.  It may be that our ancestors were simply not very good at making pottery or had a use for it that we do not yet understand.

There are some very old and badly drawn pictures in caves.  These were probably made by a stone age man or artist as he would like to have been called.

After eating there would not be much to do because this was a long time before the internet had been invented.

With nothing more than an old bone, some blood and a wall - ancient man would spend a pleasant evening drawing pictures of animals he had chased or dreamed about.

Some of those pictures are the only record we have of those long lost creatures.  It is amazing to think those drawings have lasted tens of thousands of years. 

Now we tell children off for drawing on the walls and call graffiti a crime.  That is progress.

Note for pedants.  Petroglyphs are rock carvings, pictographs are rock paintings.

One of the cool things ancient man did was to create large chalk horses on the sides of hills.  They do this by cutting away the grass and turf to reveal the white chalk underneath.

​It is the earliest known example of competitive lawn-mowing.

The horse can be seen from many miles away.  Other times they created different images but the chalk horse is the best.

If you live in England, or even if you don't, go to the White Horse Hill at Uffington.  

​Walk up the hill and sit where people thousands of years ago also sat.  Look out at the view, admire the White Horse and share that feeling with the spirits of our ancestors.

Fight Club - Brad Pitt carries a big wooden stick around
One Million Years BC - Raquel Welch in prehistoric times

There were no decent hardware stores in Stone Age times.  If you needed a tool for something either you or the nearest flint knapping expert had to make it.

They did this by banging flints with stones, pieces of bone or horn to form into a shape that worked for them.  

The idea being one side is very sharp and the rest forms a comfortable piece to hold with hand or fingers.

Flint knapping is a popular hobby among people who want to learn the skills that Ancient Man had.  

It makes a connection between the chartered accountant on a weekend flint knapping course and the flint tool maker from thousands of years ago.

The ancient people used to bury old bones so that one day geology or paleontology would be career choices.

They buried the bones in layers - the oldest ones at the bottom and then working their way up.  

​Each layer was given a name so we can have fun trying to remember them.  Jurassic, Silurian, Cretaceous and so on.

This organizing and burying of bones was a good example of forward planning.

Some geologist types say that organic matter will eventually turn to stone and that is what fossils are.

They are scientists so it is best not to trust them.

Early cavemen would call each other Homo something.  This is a historic term used in science books so it is not something to make funny remarks about.

It was a friendly welcome followed by whatever the cavemen was good at.  Homo Flint and Homo Fire are typical examples of the respectful names they would use when greeting each other.

No one knows what Homo Erectus stood for.

It was a perfect coincidence that saved our species.

The Ice Age threatened to make the world uninhabitable - except for hairy beasts like the mammoth.

It seems that stick man discovered how to make fire simply by trying to keep warm.
  
He was rubbing his hands together or spinning with one toe pointed into a wooden receptacle when all of a sudden Fire was invented.

​Sad news for the guy who discovered it of course - being burnt to a crisp. 

Those watching the tragedy with some amusement realized they could use newspapers or old furniture to create their own fire.

This led to a great deal of carbon being burnt and it was only a few short millennia before Global Warming made temperatures much more pleasant.

No more hairy mammoth skins.  In fact no more mammoths - sad face.  But lots of berries and more manageable sized animals came along and life was easier until the invention of the iPhone.

The invention of the wheel is often talked up as though it was something important.  As if developing the single biggest cause of pollution, the car, was a good thing.

Ancient man could have happily carried on walking but Progress came along.  He was sawing logs to make an attractive garden feature when a thin slice rolled off down the hill.

​That was the wheel and we never looked back.  

​Unless reversing into a parking space of course.

We say prehistoric without really thinking what that means.   It is before history.  From the Greek (or Latin no one cares) 'pre' meaning before and 'history' meaning, er, history.

Before written history that is.

People were writing stuff about 5,000 years ago.

People, or hominins (whatever they are) were using stone tools up to 3 million years ago.

So prehistory covers a pretty long period of time. 

Obviously the Neolithic people used social media in a similar way to how we do today.  I mean, it wasn't the dark ages!

Here are some of their favorite sites
​
CarvedIn - scratch your CV onto a cave wall
eBone - secondhand bone bargains
FlintBook - catch up with friends and family

Hengeify - music while you build
Mastodon - social networking for stoners
​OnlyHomos - glamor shots of stone age people

Painteddit - share painting links and troll people, an early Reddit
​Paleopedia - all they needed to know
Stoneflix - watch cave painting movies on your tablet

​TrapChat - look what we caught today!

Stonehenge was not actually built by stick man.  There was no way he could carry those massive stones two hundred miles and arrange them in a circle.

It was probably made by aliens who used it for human sacrifice, like a massive barbecue.  They subsequently mated with the old stick man species and so Modern Man was created.

Sadly, the monuments that were built by our ancient ancestors were made out of wood and have long since perished.  The artists impression shows what they could have built before the aliens arrived.

Here is the real Stonehenge or part of it.  A genuine Wonder of the World built by our ancestors.  We don't know how or why they did it despite many theories and books available.

What we do know is that pre Technology people found a way to create something that lasted for thousands of years.  A magical place.  

​Put it on your bucket list for the next Summer Solstice.

The woolly mammoth was hunted by the stick man for its meat, fur and tusks. 

That is nature so get over it.  A vegetarian would not have lasted long in the frozen tundra of the last Ice Age.  It was kill or be killed.

It is quite likely that the exercise during the hunt kept the mammoth fit and active - and many of them lived to a ripe old age.

​Ancient stick man only killed what he or his wife could carry.  If they had some left over after feasting they would hold a mammoth sale.

A Mastodon is slightly different to a Mammoth but not much.  Flatter head, straighter tusks.

Here is a small page of Mammoth Puns >>

A useful list of words for creating Stone Age Puns.

ancient, ancestor, bone, cavemen, caves, coprolite, domesticated, evolution, fire, flint, henge, homo, mammoth, mastodon, Mesolithic, Neolithic, Paleolithic, prehistoric, stone, stone age

Eventually Stone Age Man died out or changed into Modern Man.

​It is not clear when this change happened.  They did not leave many clues unless you count millions of years of historical remains.

Old boring stuff is important because history is part of what makes us human.  Respect for ancestors - the hard times they endured, the discoveries they made, the reason why we are here.

It is a pity that history is only written by the winners and politicians refuse to learn any or tell the truth about what little they do know.

Stone Age Man no longer has to care about any of that.  It is our turn now.