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THE OLDEST PICTURES IN THE WORLD

I WAS listening to the teacher, but I had my pencil in my hand. There were two little dots about an inch apart on my desk lid. Absent-mindedly I twisted my pencil point into one dot and then into the other. The two dots became two little eyes. I drew a circle around each eye, then I joined the two circles with a half-circle that made a pair of spectacles.

The next day I made a nose and a mouth to go with the eye and spectacles.

The next day I finished the face and added ears and some hair.

The next day I added a hat.

The next day I added a body, with arms, legs, and feet.

The next day I went over the drawing again, bearing heavily on my pencil. Over and over again I followed the lines till they became deep grooves in my desk lid.

The next day my teacher caught me and I caught it !

The next day my father got a bill for a new desk and I got — Well, never mind what I got.

“Perhaps he’s going to be an artist,” said my mother.

“Heaven forbid!” said my father. “That would cost me much more than a new desk.” And heaven did forbid.

I know of a school that has a large wooden tablet in the hall for its pupils to draw upon. At the top of the tablet is printed:

IF YOU JUST MUST DRAW, DON’T DRAW ON YOUR DESK,DRAW ON THIS TABLET.

If you put a pencil in any one’s hand, he just must draw something. Whether he is listening to a lesson or telephoning,he draws circles and faces or triangles and squares over the pad — if there is a pad. Otherwise he draws on the desk top or the wall, for he just must draw something. Have you ever seen any telephone pad that was not scribbled upon? We say that’s human nature. It shows you are a human being.

Now, animals can learn to do a good many things that human beings can do, but one thing an animal can’t learn is to draw. Dogs can learn to walk on two legs and fetch the newspaper. Bears can learn to dance. Horses can learn to count. Monkeys can learn to drink out of a cup. Parrots can learn to speak. But human beings are the only animals that can learn to draw.

Every boy and girl who has ever lived has drawn something at some time. Haven’t you? You have drawn, perhaps, a horse or a house, a ship or an automobile, a dog or a cat. The dog may have looked just like a cat or a cat-erpillar, but even this is more than any animal can do.

Even wild men who lived so long ago that there were no houses. only caves, to live in — men who were almost like wild animals, with long hair all over their bodies — could draw. There were no paper or pencils then. Men drew pictures on the walls of their caves. The pictures were not framed and hung on the walls. They were drawn right on the walls of the cave and on the ceiling too.

Sometimes the pictures were just scratched or cut into the wall and sometimes they were painted in afterward. The paints those men used were made of a colored clay mixed with grease, usually simply red or yellow. Or perhaps the paint was just blood, which was red at first and then turned almost black. Some of the pictures look as if they had been made with the end of a burned stick as you might make a black mark with the end of a burned match. Other pictures were cut into bone — on the horns of deer or on ivory tusks.

Now, what do you suppose these cave men drew pictures of? Suppose I asked you to draw a picture of anything —just anything. Try it. What you have drawn is probably one of five things. A cat is my first guess, a sail-boat or an automobile is my second, a house is my third guess, a tree or a flower is my fourth, and a person is my fifth. Are there any other kinds?

Well, the cave men drew pictures of only one kind of thing. Not men or women or trees or flowers or scenery. They drew chiefly pictures of animals. And what kind of animals,do you suppose? Dogs? No, not dogs. Horses? No, not horses. Lions? No, not lions. They were usually big animals and strange animals. But they were pretty well drawn, so that we know what the animals looked like. Here is a picture a cave man drew thousands of years ago.

You know it’s a picture of some animal, and it’s not a cat or a caterpillar. It is some animal of the kind they had in those days. It looks like an elephant and it was a kind of elephant — a huge elephant. But its ears were not big like our elephants’ ears and it had long hair. Elephants now have skin or hide, but hardly any hair. This animal we call a mammoth.It had long hair because the country was cold in those days and the hair kept the animal warm. And it was much, much bigger even than our elephants.

There are no mammoths alive now, but men have found their bones and they have put these bones together to form huge skeletons. We still call any very big thing “mammoth.”You’ve probably heard of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. It was called Mammoth, not because mammoths lived in it,because they didn’t, but just because it is such a huge cave.

The cave men drew other animals besides the mammoth.One was the bison, a kind of buffalo. You can see a picture of a buffalo on our five-cent piece. It looks something like a bull. A little girl had gone to a cave in Spain with her father,who was searching for arrow-heads. While he was looking on the ground, she was looking at the ceiling of the cave and she saw what she thought was a herd of bulls painted there. She called out, “See the bulls!” and her father, thinking she had seen real bulls, cried: “Where? Where?”

Other animals they drew were like those we have now — reindeer, deer with big antlers, and bears and wolves.

It was quite dark in the caves where the cave men drew these pictures, for of course there were no windows, and the only light was a smoky flame from a kind of lamp. Why,then, did they make pictures at all? Such pictures couldn’t have been just for wall decorations, like those you have on your walls, because it was so dark in the cave. We think the pictures were made just for good luck, as some people put a horseshoe over the door for good luck. Or perhaps they were to tell a story or make a record of some animal the cave man had killed. But perhaps the cave man just had to draw something, as boys and girls nowadays draw pictures on the walls of a shed or even sometimes on the walls of their own houses or, worse yet, on their desk tops.

The pictures made by these wild men — bearded and hairy cave men — are the oldest pictures in the world, and the artists who made them have been dead thousands of years.Can you think of anything you might ever make that would last as long as that? G41I9qvccOEntpNq6MtyaYzodG69Y9Ah5dyN0aCe8W3oUy5UCLzk3cR8kWNSKfEj