What Did Ancient Humans Do For Pleasure?

Full animated episode, 9:37. Published 2026-11-02.

What did ancient people do for pleasure? Almost exactly what you do: music, dice, beer, board games, cave art and jokes, just without the price tag.

Watch next: Could 2 People Repopulate the Earth? https://youtu.be/oNtbI2TmUjQ

Topics covered: what ancient humans did for fun, Stone Age free time, hunter-gatherer leisure, one of the oldest musical instruments, the first dice, the oldest beer, Stone Age chewing gum, Senet and the Royal Game of Ur, Chauvet cave art animation, the oldest joke in history.

It's 40,000 years ago, lunch is done before noon, and you have the whole afternoon free, no phone, no TV, no money. What do you do? We follow one Stone Age day off, from dawn to the stars, and every hour brings one of the oldest pleasures humans ever left behind.

Along the way: why foragers often had more free time than farmers (and maybe you), a flute up to 40,000 years old, dice made of ankle bones, 5,700-year-old chewing gum with DNA still in it, a 13,000-year-old brew, the board games of the pharaohs, cave paintings that move by firelight, and the oldest joke ever written down. Spoiler: it's a fart joke.

So what did ancient humans do for pleasure? Almost exactly what you do, just without the price tag.

Chapters

0:00 What did ancient humans do all day?

0:37 Did cavemen have more free time than us?

1:29 What did cavemen do for fun?

2:21 The oldest musical instrument (a bone flute)

3:20 The oldest dice

4:19 The oldest beer

5:31 The oldest board games

Transcript

Forty thousand years ago, you've just finished lunch. The berries are picked, the meat's cooked, and it isn't even midday. Which leaves you with one huge problem: a whole afternoon, and nothing to do. No phone. No TV. No money. And yet, by tonight, you'll have rolled the first dice... heard the first song... gotten tipsy on the first beer...

and watched the first cartoon. So let's start this morning. Ask most people how cavemen spent their days, and you'll get the same picture: starving, running from lions, working from sunrise to sunset just to stay alive. It's probably the biggest lie we tell about our ancestors. When anthropologists actually timed people who still live by foraging, the picture flipped.

Among the Agta in the Philippines, families who switched to farming ended up working around ten hours more every week than those who kept foraging. The foragers had more time to rest, to visit, to play. Your ancestors weren't always busy. Quite often... they were bored. Which raises a much better question. So let's spend one Stone Age day off with two of them.

This is Grug. This is Una. It's morning, the hunt went fine, and Grug has already run out of things to do. Boredom feels like a problem, but for a brain like ours it's a push. Leave a clever animal with nothing to do, and it starts poking things, banging rocks, trying stuff. And the first pleasure on today's list is older than humans.

Laughing. Chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans all laugh when they're tickled, the same breathy giggle, inherited from an ancestor we share. Grug decides to test this on Una. The theory holds. Briefly. Late morning, and Una is carving the wing bone of a vulture. Five holes along the side, a notch at one end. Blow across it...

and it plays. Flutes like this, made of bird bone and mammoth ivory, were dug up in caves in southern Germany, and they're up to forty thousand years old, among the oldest musical instruments ever found. Carving ivory with stone tools is slow, fiddly work. Nobody bothers... unless music really matters. And it did. Singing and moving together is how a group starts feeling like one thing.

Thirty people who barely trust each other, turned into a tribe, one song at a time. Grug would also like a turn. Noon. Una has a handful of ankle bones from yesterday's dinner. Each one has four sides that land differently, so you throw them, read the sides, and keep score. Congratulations: you've invented dice.

People rolled ankle bones for thousands of years, and the game survives as knucklebones. And in North America, archaeologists recently identified bone dice more than twelve thousand years old, thousands of years older than any dice found in the rest of the world. And the moment you have dice, you have betting. There's no money yet, so you bet whatever you've got.

Grug bets his lunch. He loses. He bets his necklace. He loses. He bets his spear. UNA: Mine. Grug now does Una's chores. Afternoon. Grug, who now owns nothing, is chewing a lump of birch tar. It's sticky and bitter, and people chewed it for thousands of years, the same tar glued their stone tools together.

One chewed piece from Denmark, about fifty-seven hundred years old, still held its chewer's DNA. A woman's. And traces of what may have been her last meal: hazelnuts and duck. But Una has found something better. In Raqefet Cave, in Israel, stone mortars hold the traces of a brew made from wild grains, about thirteen thousand years old, before anyone had planted a single field.

It was probably sour, and more like thin porridge than a pint. It was probably made for feasts honoring the dead. And it still... worked. Ancient pleasure. As advertised. As the sun goes down, those dice are about to grow up. Skip ahead about thirty-five thousand years to Egypt, and the bones have landed on a board.

Senet: thirty squares, throwing sticks for dice, played by farmers and pharaohs alike, Tutankhamun was buried with several sets. Next door in Mesopotamia, the Royal Game of Ur. Its rules were lost for about two thousand years, until a curator at the British Museum worked them out from a clay tablet. People play it again today.

Grug plays one round. Grug loses. UNA: Again? GRUG: Again. Night. Back in the cave, by the fire, Una has one more thing to show him. On the walls of Chauvet Cave in France, painted more than thirty thousand years ago, there's something odd: animals with too many legs. A bison with eight. Lions with heads drawn again and again, slightly shifted.

Mistakes? Some researchers think the opposite. Pass a flickering flame across them, and the legs seem to run and the heads seem to turn. It's motion, drawn on rock. Later Stone Age artists went further: small bone discs with an animal drawn on each side, standing on one face, lying down on the other. Spin it on a string, and the animal moves.

Tens of thousands of years before cinema... the first cartoon. Grug watches it all night. He can't lose at this one. We make ours the same way, one drawing at a time. If you like moving pictures on a wall, subscribe: the comments pick what we animate next Friday. Under the stars, one pleasure is left, and it's the oldest one we've seen today: a joke.

We'll never hear a Stone Age joke. But the oldest one ever written down is Sumerian, about thirty-nine hundred years old. And it goes, roughly, like this. Something that has never once happened since the dawn of time: a young wife who didn't fart in her husband's lap. Four thousand years of comedy, and we're still doing the same bit.

Then cities arrived. Strangers everywhere, then money everywhere. And everything Grug did for free, music, games, drinks, stories, became something you pay for. Taverns. Arenas. Tickets. So what did ancient humans do for pleasure? Almost exactly what you do. The flute became your playlist. The ankle bones became slot machines and loot boxes. The cave wall became your screen, and the brew became your Friday night.

Our brains haven't changed in forty thousand years, just the price tag. Speaking of which: here's Grug's great-great-great, and so on, grandson. Your turn: which Stone Age hobby would you have been best at, the flute, the dice, the brewing, or the cave cartoons? Tell us in the comments... and vote on what we open next.

A new question unfolds every Friday.

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