Our Antediluvian Ancestors

This Sunday newspaper strip follows a family of stone-age characters through domestic life, here depicting a hunter returning home in mud. The humor turns on anachronistic situations—a father tracking muddy footprints indoors—rendered in a prehistoric setting. The strip employs the visual conventions established by newspaper comics: sequential panels, speech balloons, and recurring characters that readers followed weekly. By the 1910s, the Sunday comics page had become a laboratory for visual storytelling, with artists developing the panel-based narrative structure that would define the emerging medium of comic books.