Our Antediluvian Ancestors

This Sunday newspaper comic strip depicts Stone Age domestic life through visual humor. The artist uses multiple concurrent scenes across the page—a common newspaper layout strategy—to show "Old Stonehatchet's" troubles: his three daughters attract suitors who hurl love letters over the wall, and one missive strikes him on the head. The strip employs the visual language codified in early newspaper comics: distinct panel composition, character labels, speech balloons, and recurring domestic situations. The humor derives from anachronistic situations—primitive humans behaving according to modern courtship customs—a formula popular in the 1910s Sunday pages that influenced the developing visual grammar of sequential art.