By M.D. Jackson and G. W. Thomas
Researchers have discovered a brand new species of human ancestor buried deep inside a South African cave system. The fossils uncovered included fifteen partial skeletons, making it the biggest single discovery of its kind in Africa. This newly discovered human ancestor, named Homo naledi, may have been one of the first members of our genus, and may change our understanding of human evolution forever.
Now while that is exciting scientific news, it made us think about art. Specifically about the different depictions of our distant ancestors from Fantasy and Science Fiction art and literature. So here we go with… Cavemen (and women)! And eventually dinosaurs.
The word “caveman” conjures up a number of images immediately. Some see skin-clad beauties living in caves and battling dinosaurs or saber-toothed tigers. The monsters are animated in a jerky Ray Harryhausen style. This has been Hollywood’s take on our ancient past. Others see it differently. Depictions of cavemen in Science Fiction and Fantasy art range from the serious and scientific to the whimsical and silly. We’ll try and include a little bit of both, but I guess we should start with the cavemen themselves. Art has been with the human race almost as long as weapons have. Cave paintings, like the ones found in caves in Lascaux, France, can be found all over the world, wherever early human beings settled. The earliest date back as much as 40,000 years.
Cave art depicts animals and the hunt for them, important activities for early mankind. They also depict early self portraits… after a fashion. Outlines of the cave people’s hands are etched into the walls of some caves. It’s the earliest way that human beings had to say “We were here” to future generations. Little did they know that those group hand portraits would echo thousands and thousands of years into the future.
Charles R. Knight was a serious artist whose paintings of prehistoric animals made him most famous and most sought after. Knight’s work has appeared in almost all the most prestigious museums all over the United States and was a frequent contributor to National Geographic Magazine. Knights portrait of Cro-Magnon artists painting in Font-de-Gaume was created in 1920, shows the act of creating cave paintings with all the majesty and significance that Knight can muster. The prehistoric artist here is depicted as heroically as any depiction of a great historical figure.
Just about as long as there has been Science delving into human prehistory, there has been fiction trying to recreate those ancient days. The first piece of prehistoric fiction was Pierre Boitard’s Etudes antédeluviennes – Paris avant les hommes. L’Homme fossile… (Antedeluvian Studies: Paris before Man. Fossil man…) (1861). The first English tale was Sir Arthur Helps’ Realmah (1868). These books followed the discovery of Neanderthal Man in Germany in 1856. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859. Old Chuck would really stir the caveman controversy with his follow-up, The Descent of Man in 1871. Fiction was glad to help with Andrew Lang’s “The Romance of the First Radical” (1886), the novels of J.-H. Rosny and a host of others including Henry Curwen, Samuel Page Widnall, Charles C. Dail and Marcel . H. G. Wells wrote two with a serial called “A Story of the Stone Age” (1897) and a standalone tale in which Cro-Magnon men encounter their Neander cousins in “The Grisly Folk” as late as 1921. (This one inspired Manly Wade Wellman’s Hok Saga and Robert E. Howard’s premiere in “Spear and Fang” (Weird Tales, July 1925) along with many other Pulpsters.
The same year that that Piltdown Man was discovered in England (later found to be a hoax), Arthur Conan Doyle changed caveman fiction forever with a staggering innovation, in The Lost World (1912), in which a group of explorers, lead by the eccentric Professor Challenger, go to South America and find a world that is inhabited by cavemen and–you guessed it–dinosaurs. Professional scientists might curse the day the book was published, for the lay public’s idea of prehistoric times was instantly and permanently marred. Dinosaurs and prehistoric man were separated by 65,000,000 years but Doyle brought them together for the first time. And nothing was the same again. (Jules Verne almost took us there before Doyle with Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) but his inner world featured only dinosaurs. The lone apeman, the Ape Gigans, in the story turns out to be a dream and no more. Verne wasn’t convinced of Darwin’s ideas.)
And Doyle had instant imitators. Edgar Rice Burroughs was probably the best and most prolific. He conjured up prehistoric worlds starting in 1913 with Pellucidar, Caspak and even in Tarzan’s jungle with Pal-U-Don. John Charles Beecham wrote “Out of the Miocene” (The Popular Magazine, September 15, 1914), editor Howard Browne penned “Warrior of the Dawn” (Amazing Stories, January 1943) and “The Return of Tharn” (Amazing Stories, October-November-December 1948) to mention three of the more popular.
But then, not all depictions of cavemen were meant to be taken seriously. Alley-Ooop, for example, was a comic book caveman in a syndicated comic strip, created in 1932 by American cartoonist V. T. Hamlin. The strip was extremely popular and ran for four decades. Alley Oop, the strip’s title character, was a sturdy citizen in the prehistoric kingdom of Moo. He rode his pet dinosaur, Dinny, carried a stone war hammer and wore nothing but a fur loincloth.
Alley Oop was eventually supplanted by The Flintstones, the modern stone-age family. Hanna-Barbera can boast that they created the second most successful prime-time animated television show (after The Simpsons), however The Flintstones’ imagery has become part of the Twentieth Century’s popular culture. Its imagery regularly finds its way into fine art, most notably with George Barr’s less than flattering portraits of Betty Rubble. In popular media such as cartoons, Porky Pig rode a dinosaur in “Prehistoric Porky” (1940) while Elmer Fudd followed in “Prehysterical Hare” in 1958. In 1966 Rachel Welch would don her fur bikini in One Million Years BC (with dinos by Ray Harryhausen), a film that was wonderfully parodied in 1981’s Caveman, starring Ringo Star. (“Atouk alunda Lana”). Ray and his dinos would return for Valley of the Gwangi in 1969.
Some of Frank Frazetta’s most well known paintings are of cavemen (and women), which is not surprising as he was one of the primary illustrators of the fiction of Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose books regularly featured prehistoric settings. Like J. Allen St. John decades before Frazetta, his Burroughs illustrations featured more than their fair share of cave folk.
Now, we’ll be honest. We understand the Science. We even have a vague idea of what 65,000,000 years means on the geological scale. Despite that, we grew up in Pellucidar, roaming the wild jungles with David Innes and Abner Perry, as they encountered everything from sabertooths to pterodactyls. We went with Bowen Tyler in a submarine to a Land That Time Forgot and saw cavemen who evolve as individuals instead of species. And we followed Tarzan (who was Terrible indeed) to Pal-U-Don where men have tails and captives are locked in an arena with a raging triceratops. I’m hopeless.
It’s no wonder movies like When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) to Jurassic Park (1993) come along, we’re there. Popcorn in hand and ready for dino-human conflict. The spirit of Conan Doyle excites our imagination in a way that Jean M. Auel’s excellent Earth’s Children (1980-2011) series can not. (I imagine Doyle and Auel (with her handy time machine) sitting together bitching about the terrible movie adaptations of their work. Doyle says, “Jean, my dear, it isn’t that an individual movie is so badly done, it is the fact that they keep trying…” Her response is, “Yes, but at least you had John Rhys Davies…”)
To conclude, we’ll take our Jack Kirby Devil Dinosaur comics, Disney’s Dinosaur, and even “Daffy and the Dinosaur” (1939) and leave the real deal for the purists. “Ugh, we alunda cavemen and dinosaurs.” For more prehistoric fun go to (http://www.trussel.com/f_prehis.htm)