Doodling in the margins and drawing on walls, traced through a memory test on bored listeners, markings older than our own species, and a cave ceiling in France that a tall man can barely reach.
You sit through a long meeting or a lecture, and the edge of the page slowly fills with boxes, arrows and stars. This video explains why your hand keeps marking whatever is in front of it.
IN THIS VIDEO
• a study where people shaded little squares and circles while they listened, and what other labs found later
• volunteers left alone in an empty room with a button, and what a bored mind chooses to do
• a zigzag cut into a shell, and the human species whose hand made it
• Neanderthal finger lines on a soft cave wall in France
• the oldest known drawing, on a stone flake shorter than your thumb, and what one archaeologist called it
• a hand stencil, a painted pig with human-like figures, and the old theories about why caves were painted
• whose hands marked a cave ceiling, and the gladiators sketched on a wall in Pompeii
• whether drawing helps you remember, and which kind of sketch makes the difference
What does your pen draw when a meeting drags on: spirals, cubes, faces or something else? Put it in the comments.
CHAPTERS
0:00 An hour into the call
0:44 A dull message about a party
3:44 A river bank on Java
5:17 Red ochre and black charcoal
6:57 Finger lines in soft clay
8:35 Drawing a word or writing it
The Ancient Cave takes an ordinary thing you did today and traces it back to the people who started doing it.
The last video followed the smoke from a neighbor’s grill, why burnt smells make you hungry: https://youtu.be/OTyBab60g3Y
Next one: a flute cut from a vulture’s wing bone, and why we can’t stand still when music plays.
The whole series in one playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbjQYiD7qYp4
Subscribing is how the next one finds you: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAncientCave?sub_confirmation=1
SOURCES
Andrade, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 2010 (shading shapes during a dull phone message)
Brown, TED, 2011 (the talk Doodlers, unite!)
Boggs, Cohen & Marchand, Psychological Thought, 2017 (the repeat in Las Vegas)
Spencer-Mueller & Fenske, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2024 (the lecture test at Guelph)
Wilson et al., Science, 2014 (alone with your thoughts and a shock button)
Kaimal et al., The Arts in Psychotherapy, 2017 (drawing and blood flow in reward areas of the brain)
Joordens et al., Nature, 2015 (the engraved shell from Trinil)
NPR, 2014 (authors and skeptics on the Trinil zigzag)
Marquet et al., PLOS ONE, 2023 (finger lines at La Roche-Cotard)
Henshilwood, d’Errico & van Niekerk, Nature, 2018 (the ochre drawing from Blombos Cave)
National Geographic, 2018 (archaeologists on what the Blombos lines are)
Oktaviana et al., Nature, 2026 (the hand stencil on Muna)
Oktaviana et al., Nature, 2024 (the painted scene on Sulawesi)
Valladas et al., Nature, 2001 (dating the charcoal of the Chauvet drawings)
Wikipedia, Lascaux (the figures at Lascaux and what the painters ate)
Helvenston & Bahn, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2004 (a critique of the trance theory)
Sharpe & Van Gelder, Antiquity, 2006 (finger lines on the ceiling at Rouffignac)
University of Cambridge, 2011 (Jess Cooney and the children of Rouffignac)
AP, 2024 (charcoal drawings found on a wall in Pompeii)
Saito, Hayashi, Takeshita & Matsuzawa, Child Development, 2014 (children, chimpanzees and a face with a missing eye)
Wammes, Meade & Fernandes, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2016 (drawing words versus writing them)
Meade, Wammes & Fernandes, Experimental Aging Research, 2018 (drawing and memory in older adults)
National Geographic, 2009 (the bone flute from Hohle Fels)
#Doodling #Drawing #CaveArt #Prehistory #Archaeology #Psychology #HumanEvolution #Boredom
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