MONTIGNAC, France — While examining the walls of a recently unearthed cave system, a team of archaeologists discovered a series of ASCII drawings consisting of various animals and humans, believed to be thousands of years old.
“We hoped to find traces of a primitive keyboard, or fragments of a fossilized meme or two, but finding full ASCII drawings is truly spectacular. This should change how we see prehistoric man,” the lead archeologist, Greg Fiore, said. “No longer are they drooling Neanderthals, but instead a group of highly skilled artists that can create wonderful works using only the characters on their keyboards, which we have found were made of various sticks and rocks.”
A professional ASCII artist, Judy Gomp, had much to say about the recent findings.
“The way the keystrokes are imprinted shows that they most likely were using an early kind of mechanical keyboard,” Gomp said while analyzing the drawings. “Look at how the mammoth’s tusks are made out of single parenthesis. Nowadays, one would use a more complex character like a curly bracket. But the fundamentals are here. It goes to show that the tradition of ASCII art, from these breathtaking drawings to the dazzling ROFLcopter to the sick-ass Zelda walkthrough header, are part of our DNA as humans.”
Fiore also found several other artifacts hidden in the cave.
“We may have discovered the earliest cat meme,” Fiore began. “It is an abstract image of a saber-toothed tiger, and we were able to translate the words that accompanied it: ‘I Can Has Mammoth Meat?’ The image and text are in pristine condition, a rare sight for a meme of this age. Our dating puts it back to around 5000 B.C.”
The excavation is ongoing, but the team has hypothesized that the ASCII drawings were used as the header for a hunting walkthrough of the area.