Our Antediluvian Ancestors

A prehistoric humor strip built on the contrast between primitive life and modern domestic frustration. The strip follows a caveman whose wife complains he works too slowly, prompting him to invent a 'saw.' His innovation backfires when she puts him to work all day cutting firewood—a joke about unintended consequences of labor-saving devices. The four-panel structure uses speech balloons to drive narrative and humor, with exaggerated character expressions and simple line work typical of early newspaper comics. The strip exploits the popular "stone age ancestors" formula, which allowed cartoonists to comment on contemporary life through anachronistic gags, a frequent strategy in the Sunday pages that helped establish comics as a mass medium.