THE MARQUEE

We’ve been watching movies about our prehistoric past for 100 years, but rarely do these films offer an accurate reflection of human nature Justine Smith

We’ve been watching movies about prehistoric humans for 100 years, but what on earth are they telling us?

In a 1914 short, His Prehistoric Past, Charlie Chaplin falls asleep on a bench and wakes up in an anthropological dream dressed in a bearskin toga – but with his signature bowler hat intact. One of the earliest examples of our ancient ancestors on the big screen, Chaplin’s movie played off the enduring curiosity we possess for our prehistoric past.

With the upcoming release of Alpha, an ice age story about the domestication of dogs, the cinematic legacy of prehistoric life continues to thrive more than 100 years later. Across different genres and eras, our hunger for stories of Paleolithic humans represents an insatiable desire to better understand our evolutionary origins.

Movies that capitalize on this curiosity tend to offer little more than a glorification of human history by suggesting that modernity has led us astray; that our syllable-grunting ancestors had a better grasp of the things that really matter. However, it’s the films that subvert the projected idea that humanity progressed through good morality that end up being more memorable as they directly challenge the way we see our past and, therefore, the way we see ourselves.

Films like the iconic One Million Years B.C. (1966) tackle early human life as if it was a fantasy world like Middle Earth. Cavemen battle dinosaurs and rescue perfectly proportioned damsels in distress. Like a proto-superhero film, movies like these indulge a kind of fantasy of male heroism, where the strongest survive and procreate. This strand of prehistoric films indulge in full-on escapism. Pitted against nature, with a combination of cunning and moral goodness, our ancestors were able to rise to the top of the food chain.

Flattery plays a big role in many films about the caveman era and even the comedies about the prehistoric world seem to point toward an humanity’s inherent importance. Most films about our ancestors are imbued with an idea that despite our most primal instincts, we are set apart from other animals by our intelligence and moral values.

A children’s family comedy like The Croods (2013) offers a representative take on the prehistoric comedy. In the film, a family of cavepeople is torn between a cautious father and a reckless innovator. They are forced to find the balance between safety and curiosity in order to survive. Offering a lesson in compromise, while also emphasizing the importance of family, the film argues that modern humans are fundamentally the same as our prehistoric ancestors. If anything, movies like this suggest that we would be happier and even more successful if we were to “get back to the basics,” and live by the primitive doctrines of the past.

Even something like Encino Man (1992), a teen sex comedy in which Brendan Fraser and his abs emerge out of a frozen block of ice, is about the lessons we can learn from our distant past. A classic fish-out-of-water scenario sets us up to assume it is modern man who has everything to offer to our primitive ancestors, but in the end, it is the Encino Man who has the most important lessons to teach. In their interactions with a literal Neanderthal, the teens in the film learn the value of love and life.

Cornered into the realm of popular cinema, most of these films pique our curiosity about our ancient world and quickly satisfy it with jokes, action and easily digestible lessons. While allowing our imagination to stretch, they don’t actually challenge us to really think about what life may have been like in the prehistoric world. Rather than actually seek to answer our questions about early life, they indulge and flatter our egos as they romanticize our earliest ancestors.

There are some films that attempt to recreate life as it may have been, most notably the Canadian production Quest for Fire (1981) directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. A near-silent film about a tribe’s struggle to control fire in a transitionary period of evolution, Annaud’s film is largely stripped of romanticism. The film attempts to recreate the real world of early man and the true difficulties it presented. Alienating to audiences used to seeing prehistoric life played for laughs and moral-of-the-story theatrics, the film effectively captures the brutal primal nature of man as it subverts the palatable human history we’re so used to seeing.

While a bit more fantastical, given the giant black monolith, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) comes to a similarly distressing conclusion in its opening chapter, the Dawn of Man. Featuring humanoid apes who evolve through a combination of murder and cosmic magic, the film offers a dark version of transition as beast becomes man. Unlike the comedy and action films that use a prehistoric backdrop to remind us the importance of moral good in our evolution, 2001: A Space Odyssey directly contradicts this thinking by proposing it is our destructive impulses that helped us innovate, use tools and, ultimately, evolve our way toward dominance.

Representations suggesting early humans were not kind, compassionate or “good,” challenge the way we see ourselves. By watching films set in our prehistoric past, we search for a connection to our most distant ancestors in the hopes of answering the most important questions to do with survival of our species. The truth that we might not be as special as we imagined can be a difficult pill to swallow – and it’s understandable why blockbuster cinema strays so frequently from such a medicinal dose. At a time when social media seems to be further entrenching the worst of our tribal instincts, perhaps a better, more accurate understanding of the more regrettable aspects of our nature would help us guard against our ill-advised instincts.

Maybe – just maybe – there is a lesson to be learned from humanity’s story after all. It’s just rarely the one we see onscreen.