Page 19 - SYTYGIB Prehistoric Times

If camping isn’t your thing, how about caving? A cave is definitely less flimsy than a tent, but still short on basics like toilets, fridges and games consoles. You also might have had to share your living room with some rather gruff neighbours – cAvE BeArS, cAvE LiOnS and HyAeNaS – all of whom have a habit of eating people, which is very bad manners.
I can´t wait for doors to be invented!
Stone Age people would have used caves to shelter and cook in. They were imaginative and told stories around the fire, made sculptures from mammoth ivory and bone, modelled clay figures of animals and people, and painted pictures on cave walls.
Do you ever wish . . . you could use something other than paper when you do art lessons in class? How about a cave? Is that different enough for ya?
Stone Age people in Europe made jewellery and sculptures from tusks and bones. That’s something you can do too if your dog is happy to share its bones.
But it’s the art these people made in caves, which survives to this day, that has the WoW factor. They created pictures of animals such as horses, reindeer, bison, mammoths and rhinos, as well
as people and hands.
Kids got their hands dirty too – literally! Archaeologists think even Stone Age toddlers may have been encouraged to develop their creative skills through an ancient form of finger- painting. A well-known set of caves in France, known as the Cave of a Hundred Mammoths (which is like your bedroom being known as The Room of a Hundred Stinky Socks) contain designs called ‘fluting’, which is when fingers are dragged over soft red clay to produce patterns. Many of the lines were possibly made by small children – and one chamber in the cave has so many flutings made by little kids that experts reckon it may have been an area set aside just for them!
Some folk even did spray painting! Not with cans of paint, but by blowing dye through hollow wing bones from birds. Very creative . . . unless you’re a bird.
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