This Is the Oldest Toy Ever Found, and How Much It Sucks

One of the oldest enemies of the human mind, one that I assume has been around about as long as consciousness, is boredom. I bet that, even for the very first almost-monkey that achieved a state of self-awareness, within a week they were like, “Okay, so what do I do now?” 

Now, it’s not like boredom is necessarily a bad thing. It’s generally an indicator that your life is fairly free of immediate threats. Getting dropped into the middle of the Amazon sight unseen wouldn’t be boring, but it definitely wouldn’t be fun either. Even in less certain times, though, I’m sure that people needed something to occupy their minds — or more importantly occupy the minds of their children so that they could finish gutting a mammoth before the scavengers came.

All of which begs two questions: 1) What’s the oldest toy ever found?; and 2) did it suck?

The answer to the first question is a little tougher for archaeologists to identify than I would have guessed. Mainly because the kids that were playing with them are obviously long done and dusted. And so, when weird little trinkets are unearthed, said archaeologists have to use context clues to figure out whether they’re looking at some sort of ancient Pog or a grim religious artifact that was shoved into the eyelids of the deceased. 

That said, there’s one artifact that archaeologists think may be one of the oldest human toys, something that was used to pass time in caves around the Ice Age up to 18,000 years ago. They’re little carved discs called “rondelles.” Made of stone or ivory, they were flat discs with a hole in the middle that could have let them be threaded onto fibers. The surfaces were carved with designs and animals, and spinning the rondelle so that the two sides alternated quicker than the eye could follow might have functioned as an ancient, two-frame flip-book.

As for my judgment of it, I’m pleased to say that, honestly, it doesn’t suck! If somebody handed me one of these in a park today, I could get at least a couple minutes of joy and curiosity out of it. After all, it’s something that you can spin and shows you a cartoon, which are two things that modern kids are still fully into. I doubt they had safety standards in mind, but that little hole in the middle also probably prevented some cave child from choking. 

Either way, it’s still more fun than one of those sets of flash cards that’s trying to pretend it’s not just printed multiplication tables.