Cavemen

A caveman is a based upon widespread but anachronistic and conflated concepts of the way in which neanderthals, early modern humans, or archaic hominins may have looked and behaved. The term originates out of assumptions about the association between early humans and caves, most clearly demonstrated in cave painting. The term is not used in academic research.

Cavemen are typically portrayed as wearing shaggy animal hides, and capable of cave painting like behaviourally modern humans of the ice-age (50,000-10,000 years ago). Anachronistically, they are simultaneously shown armed with rocks or cattle bone clubs, unintelligent, and aggressive, traits more like those of ice-age Neanderthals or of pre-ice-age archaic hominins from hundreds of thousands of years before this period. Popular culture also frequently represents cavemen as living with or alongside dinosaurs, even though dinosaurs became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period, 66 million years before the emergence of the human species.

The image of them living in caves arises from the fact that caves are where the preponderance of artifacts have been found from European ice-age cultures such as Les Eyzies, although this most likely reflects the degree of preservation that caves provide over the millennia rather than an indication of their typical form of shelter. Until the ice age most early modern humans and hominins did not live in caves, being nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes living in a variety of temporary structures such as tents (see Jerry D. Moore, "The Prehistory of Home", University of California Press, 2012) and wooden huts (e.g. at Ohalo). Their societies were similar to those of many modern day indigenous peoples. A few genuine pre-ice-age cave dwellings did however exist such as Mt. Carmel in Israel.

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