Caveman  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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A caveman is a popular stock character based upon stereotyped concepts of the way in which early prehistoric humans or homininans may have looked and behaved. The term is sometimes used colloquially to refer to the Neanderthals or Cro-Magnon (i.e., Homo sapiens of the Paleolithic era). The term has been discouraged in serious use, due to its inaccuracy and dependence on certain misconceptions about early humans.

Archetype

Popular conceptions of cavemen can be seen as reflecting either the brutal savage image of the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who famously held that the life of the human being without civilization was "...poore, nasty, brutish and short"; or, on the other hand, the noble savage vision of uncivilized man, popularly associated with Rousseau.

Caveman-like Heraldic "wild men" were found in European iconography for hundreds of years. During the Middle Ages, these creatures were generally depicted in art and literature as bearded and covered in hair, and often wielding clubs and dwelling in caves. While wild men were always depicted as living outside of civilization, there was an ongoing debate as to whether they were human or animal.

Cavemen are portrayed as wearing butty animal hides, armed with rocks or cattle bone clubs, unintelligent, and aggressive. Cavemen are often shown as living in caves, possibly because that is where the preponderance of ritual paintings and artifacts have been found. Although it is probable that Neanderthals and early humans lived elsewhere as well as in caves, artifacts proving this would have been destroyed over millennia, while that which had been left in caves survived to be discovered. Nevertheless, expressions such as "living in a cave" have become cultural metaphors for a modern human who supposedly displays traits of brutishness or extreme ignorance. See also troglodyte.

Misconceptions

In fiction, especially as pure entertainment or satire, cavemen are sometimes depicted as living contemporaneously with dinosaurs, a situation contradicted by archaeological and paleontological evidence which shows that non-avian dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, at which time true primates had not yet appeared.In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) ape-men are depicted in a fight with modern humans. Edgar Rice Burroughs adapted this idea for The Land That Time Forgot (1915).

Cavemen movies

A genre of caveman movies emerged, typified by D. W. Griffith's Man's Genesis (1912); they inspired Charles Chaplin's satiric take, in His Prehistoric Past (1914) as well as Brute Force (1914), The Cave Man (1912), and later Cave Man (1934). From the descriptions, Griffith's characters can't talk (handy for a silent film), and use sticks and stones for weapons, while the hero of Cave Man is a Tarzan-like figure who fights dinosaurs.

List of films

• His Prehistoric Past, 1914 Charlie Chaplin silent film
• Three Ages, 1923 Buster Keaton silent film
• Flying Elephants, 1928 Laurel and Hardy silent film
• One Million B.C., 1940
• Mysterious Island (half a dozen films)
• Caveman Inki, 1950 (Warner Brothers Chuck Jones cartoon)
• Teenage Caveman, 1958 Roger Corman film and 2002 TV series
• Eegah, 1962
• One Million Years B.C., 1966
• It's About Time (TV series 1966-67)
• When Women Had Tails, 1970
• When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, 1970
• Planet of Dinosaurs, 1971
• The Land That Time Forgot, 1975
• The People That Time Forgot, 1977
• Caveman, 1981
• History of the World, Part I, 1981
• Quest for Fire, 1981
• Luggage of the Gods!, 1983
• Iceman, 1984
• The Clan of the Cave Bear, 1986
• Encino Man, 1992
• The Flintstones, 1994
• Bikini Cavegirl, 2004
• 10,000 BC, 2008
• Year One, 2009

Comics

In popular culture, the comic strips B.C., Alley Oop and occasionally The Far Side and Gogs portray "cavemen" in that way. (Larson, in his The Prehistory of the Far Side, stated he once felt that he needed to confess his cartooning sins in this regard: 'O Father, I Have Portrayed Primitive Man and Dinosaurs In The Same Cartoon'." The animated television series "The Flintstones", a spoof on family sitcoms, portrays the Flintstones not in caves, but in 1950s–1960s ranch-style homes that suggested caves and had stone fittings.

Advertising

Stereotypical cavemen are also often featured in advertising, including advertisements for Minute Maid. More recently, GEICO launched a series of television commercials and attempts at viral marketing, collectively known as the GEICO Cavemen advertising campaign, where GEICO announcers are repeatedly denounced by modern cavemen for perpetuating a stereotype of unintelligent, backward cavemen. The GEICO advertisements spawned a short-lived TV series called Cavemen.

Documentaries

• Walking with Cavemen
• Walking with Beasts
• Cavemen Land On Earth

Caveman characters

• Alley Oop
• Anthro
• B.C.
• Captain Caveman
• Chuck Rock
• The Flintstones
• Gogs
• Land of the Lost (1974 TV series)
• Mightor
• Stig of the Dump
• The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw
• Tor
• Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, a Saturday Night Live sketch
• GEICO Cavemen
• Yahoo in Gulliver's Travels
• J. P. Manoux, plays Curtis the Caveman on the Disney show Phil of the Future
• Bob from Prometheus and Bob on KaBlam! on Nickelodeon
• Cave Guy, a villain on Freakazoid
• The Slag Brothers (Rock and Gravel) in Wacky Races
• Dveg & Gorg (from the Scottish TV series Cavemen)
• Oogtar and other cave people characters from Super Mario World
• Slash, of the Mega Drive Game Eternal Champions

Novels

• The Village in the Treetops, 1901
• Quest for Fire, 1911
• The Cave Girl, 1913
• The Inheritors, 1955
• Dance of the Tiger, 1980
• Earth's Children series
  • The Clan of the Cave Bear, 1980
  • The Valley of Horses, 1982
  • The Mammoth Hunters, 1985
  • The Plains of Passage, 1990
  • The Shelters of Stone, 2001
• Eden series
  • West of Eden, 1984
  • Winter in Eden, 1986
  • Return to Eden, 1989

See also

• Animal behavior
• Cro-Magnon
• Human evolution
• Neanderthal
• Paleolithic
• Neanderthals in popular culture
• Prehistoric fiction