The paintings in the Lascaux cave in France are about 17,000 years old. They are not scratches. Horses, bulls, and deer are drawn with a practiced line, in places the artists had to reach with lamps. People were making careful pictures of animals long before they were writing histories of themselves. The urge to look, and to show, is older than the archive.
Worth knowing
Careful pictures of animals are older than written history.