Kids Have Been Drawing Violent Battles And Fantastical Beasts on Their Homework Since The 13th Century

There’s something about drawing stick figures with weapons and monsters in the margins of your homework that stands the test of time.

Even in the age of iPads and Minecraft, give most kids a pencil and paper (and, even better, a piece of schoolwork to procrastinate), and they will find their way into the age-old tradition of doodling.

We know this habit has a long history, thanks to a kid named Onfim.

Long before the ‘cool S‘, Onfim left his illustrious mark on soft birch bark in the mid-13th century.

Historians believe he was around 6 or 7 years old when he created these incredible doodles, which in many ways are more illuminating of the child’s life in medieval Russia than the schoolwork they were sketched around.

While practicing writing in Cyrillic, he drew himself and what we assume are his friends, lined up beneath the letters:

On the back of his homework, he imagined himself as a “wild beast”, a centaur-like creature with a curly tail:

He depicted ferocious battles, with arrows flying, horses galloping, and slain soldiers trodden underfoot:

And in this one, he cast himself as the hero, writing his own name in Cyrillic letters (Онѳиме):

As a young member of the Novgorod Republic, Onfim’s literacy is actually less strange than it may seem, despite his young age.

Scholars believe Novgorod society had unusually high levels of literacy during the medieval period, perhaps afforded by the extensive birch forests that surrounded the capital city.

Birch bark, with its peelable papery layers, was readily available for writing, and much cheaper than the paper or parchment other societies had to turn to.

So write, the people of Novgorod did.

More than 1,100 pieces of inscribed birch bark (aka beresta) have been discovered in the area since the 1950s, preserved surprisingly well across the centuries.

These birch bark letters date from the 11th to 16th centuries.

But among this trove of beresta, we like Onfim’s works the best.

Despite the ubiquity of doodling across the centuries, there isn’t much research into why humans of all ages, but especially school children, have this seemingly ingrained habit.

One study suggests the distraction of drawing a scene could help children regulate unpleasant moods.

A study conducted back in 2009 found participants could better recall information they heard over the phone if they could doodle away while listening.

But when this research was replicated with two slightly different experiments, those results suggested doodling did little to help focus the mind, or absorb information better.

Drawing gives young children opportunities to hone their fine motor skills, which are an important part of how humans interact with the world.

Some neuroscientists have even proposed it’s an important part of integrating our senses, bodies, and brains.

“Each stroke functions as a learning trial in which the child formulates a sensorimotor prediction (‘if I move my hand like this, the mark will go there’), receives immediate feedback on the position and shape of the trace, and updates its internal models of how arm and hand movements translate into a visual and tactile pattern,” they propose.

Related: Thousands of Human Languages May Have Been Erased – Even Before Colonialism

Scribbles, doodles, and drawings are often the first marks we make, before we progress to more abstract modes of expression, like writing text and numbers.

Whatever you make of Onfim’s drawings, there’s something special about the idea that kids have been doodling on their homework for centuries.