Tag: cave paintings

False Facts for the Summer!

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Elmer Fudd Cardboard Cutout / Standee / Standup. Buy Looney Tunes Cardboard Cutouts at Starstills.com

G’day! Byron the Quokka here, announcing the latest release from Acme False Facts Inc.–the Deluxe False Facts Summer Set for 2022! If you order now, before the first day of summer, you’ll get $85 taken off your shipping and handling. And you’ll also have time to memorize some of your favorite false facts, to be trotted out on the beach to an awed and admiring crowd.

Here’s a wee selection of items on the menu, just to turn you on. All facts guaranteed 100% false!

*Elmer Fudd was a real person; in fact, he was a U.S. Senator named Frank Feezle, best known for saying, “Mistah Vice Pwesident, thea’s something vewy scwewy going on awound hea!”

*Cave paintings found near Shoatsburgh, Pennsylvania, radiocarbon-dated to 2000 B.C. depict all the major characters from the “Archie” comic strip. Scientists admit they’re puzzled.

*The largest goldfish ever caught on rod and reel (by Mrs. Bertha Fandango, 1911) was really only 7 inches long; but it looked much bigger from certain angles. The entry in the record book has been slightly modified.

*World Chess Champion Boris Slitely used to practice by pushing chessmen off a shelf and watching them bounce on the floor. Then he would jump off his chair and bat the fallen chessmen around the floor until they disappeared under the furniture.

*In 1584 Sultan Abdel-el-Kukri Rogers ordered all Turkish Navy personnel to call each other by pet names. He was overthrown by Osman “Fido” McQuillan, who much later on in life became a TV talk show host.

Remember–stand tall, throw out your chest, look ’em in the eye, and recite a false fact. You’ll be amazed how it moves people to stand in awe of you. You might even have a future in politics!

Just $779.95 for the whole set.

Lizards or Leprechauns?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

One of the more popular pastimes during the Ice Age was to paint on the walls of caves. Cave paintings of assorted animals are justly famous for their high artistic quality.

Folks back then also liked to make stencils of their hands. Thousands of ’em. Maybe it was a kind of signature.

A Prehistoric Mystery

Which brings us to the little tiny hands, smaller than a baby’s, stenciled on the walls of several caves in the Sahara Desert–which wasn’t a desert then, and the Ice Age didn’t reach that far south.

Scientists are puzzled. Whose hands could those be? Why take any trouble to stencil lizard-hands?

Gnomes, leprechauns, brownies–take your choice. You might be right.

‘A Prehistoric Mystery’ (2016)

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

See the source image

“Kilroy was here,” 15,000 B.C.

Once upon a time, before the Sahara was a desert, people lived there and sometimes painted pictures on the rocks. Sometimes they just spread a hand on the rock and squirted paint around it: probably a kind of signature.

We are occasionally asked to believe that lizards did this, too.

https://leeduigon.com/2016/03/01/a-prehistoric-mystery/

I’ve had a lot of different kinds of lizards as pets, and not a single one of them ever displayed the slightest interest in painting anything.

A Prehistoric Mystery

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Here’s a bunch of hands stenciled onto a cave wall by prehistoric artists with a lot of time on their… er, hands. But the hands in the Sahara cave are too small to be human.

In many places throughout Europe and elsewhere, cave-dwellers used to blow a mist of paint through a tube to create stencils of their hands on the walls. It was a very common pastime. Well, it was still the Ice Age outside, they had to find something to do to stave off cabin fever (before cabins were invented).

Scientists exploring a cave in Egypt were puzzled by hand stencils made of very, very small hands, smaller than a baby’s ( http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3469858/Tiny-handprints-Stone-Age-shelter-NOT-human-8-000-year-old-baby-stencils-Cave-Beasts-created-lizards.html ). Having ruled out human hands, the best theory they could come up with was that these are the outlines of lizard hands.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it for a while.

There was no Ice Age in the Sahara, and back when these paintings were made, it wasn’t a desert. There are lots and lots of paintings here of people and animals, lots and lots of stenciled hands–and these little bitty stenciled hands.

Why would anyone go to the trouble to stencil-paint a bunch of lizard hands? We take it for granted that the lizards didn’t do it themselves. I have a lot of experience with lizards, and I can tell you it’d be hard to get a lizard to hold still while you made a stencil of his paw. A dead lizard would suffice–but why would anybody do this?

We are not told whether the scientists have bothered to rule out space aliens, gnomes, or fairies.

My money’s on the gnomes.