Cavemen (No Dinosaurs!)

In past posts I was largely interested in Cavemen & Dinosaurs (my phrase for the fantastic prehistoric, as best represented by Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar series.) This time I am not. Nor am I including any Lost World stuff, where modern people encounter cavefolk lost in time such as ERB’s The Cave Girl (1913). I wanted to look at some of the more accurate non-dino cavemen stories that appeared in the Age of the Storytellers, largely predating Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912). The straight caveman tale was a popular genre, largely in novel form, from 1865 and on, especially in France. This tradition of adventures of cave folk found its way into the magazines of the 1890s through H. G. Wells but became something of a story type right into the Pulps. Robert E. Howard’s “Spear and Fang” (Weird Tales, July 1925)and C. M. Eddy’s “With Weapons of Stone” (Weird Tales, December 1924) and “Arhl of the Caves” (Weird Tales, January 1925) see the end of this trend. Many of these writers used the prehistoric setting to comment on social themes from barbarism to Eugenics. Some like Wells tried to be true to current trends in Science, while others saw it as just another genre of fiction with set stereotypes and tropes, falling short of including extinct lifeforms like dinosaurs.

H. G. Wells has two very important milestone stories. The first is “Stories of the Stone Age” (The Idler, May-September 1897) which got the magazine version of this sub-genre rolling. He wrote five segments about the life of Ugh-lomi and his rise, through new technology such as horses and hand-held weapons, to become the leader of his tribe. This focus on technology will be a common theme in the stories that follow. Hugo Gernsback reprinted the series in Amazing Stories, November 1927 as an example to future SF writers.

“The Pagan’s Progress” (1904)  by Gouverneur Morris uses a joke in its title, referring to Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) a religious allegory by John Bunyan. Morris offers us a prehistoric version of Sunrise’s journey to manhood.

Jack London (1906-1911) wrote several stories about cavemen. Go here for more.

In The Morning of Time (1912) by Sir Charles G. D. Roberts began as a fifteen story series that formed the book with “The Fight at the Wallow” (The Windsor Magazine, August 1908) which switched to The London Magazine and then The Pall Mall Magazine. The series follows Grom and his tribe as they navigate through the dangers of a primitive world. This is a straight caveman series except for one odd segment that appears in second last segment “The Lake of the Long Sleep” (Nash’s and Pall Mall Magazine April 1915). Trapped in a swamp, the cavefolk are attacked by what must be a T. rex. Roberts describes it as jumping like a kangaroo, a detail Lester Dent will repeat in the Doc Savage novels in the 1930s. (Written three years after The Lost World, even Roberts couldn’t resist!) Roberts was Canada’s number one poet for many decades but wrote animal and adventure stories on the side. His brother Theodore Goodrich Roberts was also a Pulp writer.

“As In the Beginning” by Dulcie Deamer (The Lone Hand, 1909) was a series of five stories by an Australian author. The artwork isn’t shy about nudity, which most publications of this time and later, especially in America, would have covered with convenient strands of hair or leopard skins clothing designs that reflect the time they were published it.

Rudyard Kipling (1902-1911) also famously wrote several cavemen stories, though perhaps a bit more tongue-in-cheek than some. His most straight forward one was “The Knife and the Naked Chalk” (Harper’s Monthly, December 1909). It was reprinted in Rewards and Fairies (1910).

“The Prehistoric Scout” by Lewis Spence (The Oxford Annual for Scouts, 1918) was written for boys. Later many juvenile magazines would feature cave-boy characters like Boys’ Life, The American Boy as well as British story papers like The Triumph.

“The People of the Glacier” by Clyde B. Hough (All-Story Weekly, December 20, 1919-January 10, 1920) is the first American Pulp to use the straight caveman setting. Others like The Popular Magazine would follow, though dinosaurs were often featured.

“The Grisly Folk” (Saturday Evening Post, March 12, 1921 and reprinted in The Storyteller, April 1921) by H. G. Wells is probably far more important for Pulp fiction than Wells’s earlier Stories of the Stone Age. It is fairly easy to see its influence on Robert E. Howard’s “Spear and Fang” where Wells’s impression of the fierce Neanderthals inspired Howard’s fierce fight story. This same influence can be seen in Manly Wade Wellman’s Hok the Mighty series. MWW calls the Neanderthals “Gnorlls” and makes them nasty, too. Wells’s story may have been a factor in the public domain usage of “Neanderthal” as a primitive and stupid person, which came out of England around 1926.

Irving J. Crump (1921-1936) produced a lengthy series for children called Og, Son of Fire for Boys’ Life, a magazine he edited. These tales were collected into four books. For more on Og, go here.

“The Mammoth Man” by George Langford got an abridged version in The American Boy, February-May 1922) I suspect this was done to compete with the Og series over at Boys’ Life.

Conclusion

My exposure to the true caveman story wasn’t through any of these stories, which to be honest were not easy to find when I was a kid. My caveman book was Fire Hunter (1951) by Jim Kjelgaard, which very much follows these earlier pieces. Say what you like about dog books, but you can see why this one jumped out at me, a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs. Big Red is a good novel but Fire Hunter was what I wanted. I had no idea I was reading a part of a trend that began about a hundred years before I was born and has carried on to the present day. I am not surprised that Jean Auel’s The Clan of The Cave Bear was a hit. It was the logical descendant of a long history of cave literature.

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