Facets of BrettW

I think the answer is 'yes, but the rules for drawing a stick figure vary culturally'. It's difficult to extrapolate from cave art, since this was obviously done by the contemporary equivalent of art professionals, but there are several obvious ways to draw a stick-figure. For instance, you can draw the arms and legs as two down-curving lines and then add the torso and neck as a vertical line connecting the two.

There are, IIRC, more universal, trans-cultural rules governing how very small children draw - in particular, when they stop drawing people as a blob with limbs sticking out of it, and give them a separate head. So stick-figures assume a certain level of artistic sophistication, believe it or not.

One thing I noticed in Botswana was that Anglophone kids, when asked to draw a face, drew an egg-shape and put eyes, nose, mouth inside it; Batswana children drew faces in profile with a single line. The stick figure you or I would draw would be represented as full-face; a lot of cultures represent stick-figures as side-on by default.

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heh. Cool stuff. Cheers!

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i don't know, but here is a snippet of data for you...

the other day i was taken on a walk in western nsw (living out here now) by an aboriginal elder. he showed me some paintings that have been dated at about 9000 years old. there were a couple of stick people in them. there were three kinds of art there really.

1. "stencils" (put up their hand or every day object like a boomerang etc and spat paint mixture around it) (no stick people there),

2. "etchings" (used sharp rock to etch out thousands of small dots to fill in a shape) (there were pics of people in this method, but they weren't typical stick figures, for example they included details of head dresses. they were closer to silhouettes than stick figures) (i guess it's not a "real easy" form of art either, must've taken days!)

3. "paintings" these included lines, stick people, stick goannas (!!!) and animal tracks. the stick people looked just like the ones that i draw today. the stick goannas also looked like stick people, just with the centre line extended downwards to represent the tail.

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ps. some of the etchings were dated at 25000 yrs old. the stencils were maybe only a few hundred years old. the paintings 9000 years maybe.

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Nice! That must have been quite an experience. Being next to something so fantastically old would be unreal. The etchings sound crazy.

Thanks for that.

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