CAVEMEN & DINOSAURS

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, Marcel Schwob and Stanley Waterloo.

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. Close but no cigar.)

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 C. Browne penned "Warrior of the Dawn" (Amazing Stories, January 1943) and "The Return of Tharn" (Amazing Stories, Oct-Nov-Dec 1948) to mention three of the more popular.

Writers didn't give up on the pure caveman scenario. H. G. Wells wrote a straight one, in which Cro-Magnon men encounter their Neander cousins in "The Grisly Folk" as late as 1921, but in popular media such as cartoons Porky Pig is depicted as a dinosaur-owning caveman in "Prehistoric Porky" (1940). From September 30, 1960, to April 1, 1966, The Flintstones would be our favorite "prehistoric family" and 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.

Now I'm going to be honest. I understand the Science. I even have a vague idea of what 65,000,000 years means on the geological scale. Despite that, I grew up in Pellucidar, roaming the wild jungles with David Innes and Abner Perry, as they encountered everything from sabertooths to pterodactyls. I went with Bowen Tyler in a submarine to a Land That Time Forgot and saw cavemen who evolve as individuals instead of species. And I 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, I'm there. Popcorn in hand and ready for dino-human conflict. The spirit of Conan Doyle excites my 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, I'll take my Jack Kirby Devil Dinosaur comics, Disney's Dinosaur, and even "Daffy and the Dinosaur" (1939) and leave the real deal for the purists. "Ugh, Gee-dubble-you alunda cavemen and dinosaurs." For more prehistoric fun go to this great site.