Theme: Cavemen

Cavemen is the generalised term given to early humanoids at a point prior to the establishment of civilisation. Anthropology will break these down into nomenclatures like Neanderthal, Australopithecus, Homo Sapiens and others. It is not necessary to concern ourselves with these here as the films discussed rarely make any distinction. (Cavemen equally refers to cavewomen, although the gender neutral Cave People sounds odd on the tongue).

There are assorted depictions of cavemen set during Prehistory. In many of these, we frequently see them anachronistically coexisting with dinosaurs despite the fact that 64 million years separate the two species. There were also several Lost World efforts showing cavemen still existing in forgotten pockets of prehistory amid the present-day.

The 1950s gave us the atomically revived dinosaur with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). Not long after, we began to get the revived caveman effort where they would variously be unfrozen and forced to bewilderingly confront a modern-day – for which see Prehistoric Revivals.

The 1960s gave us the first of the comic prehistoric works with tv’s The Flintstones (1960-6) and there have been various prehistoric and revived caveman comedies since then, both live-action and animated. The 1980s saw a move towards the depiction of much more anthropologically realistic prehistoric films beginning with Quest for Fire (1981).