Introduction

This short chapter opens with a scene set in 1911, in which Antarctic explorers from throughout the British Empire listen to a recording of the era’s most famous cave man in their hut near the South Pole. This demonstrates how the cave man had been insinuated into global popular culture. The introduction then briefly sketches the character’s genesis, noting the importance of popular evolutionary theories and especially Charles Darwin, the role played by the cartoonist Edward Tennyson ‘E.T.’ Reed and the international influence of his drawings. The use of the term ‘cave man’ to refer to these ancient humans is discussed as are issues surrounding gender and race. Finally, a short note about primary sources discusses how digitisation and searchable databases have revolutionised the ways in which popular culture can be explored, reconstructed and understood.

Antediluvian pictorial fun: E.T. Reed and the prehistoric peeps

This chapter is centred on the ‘prehistoric peeps’ cartoons that E.T. Reed began publishing in Punch magazine in 1893. These immensely influential images, which appeared for years and were reproduced throughout the English-speaking world, marked the point at which the cave man character entered popular culture. Reed’s scruffy human cave men were not related to gorillas or missing links and so they posed no existential racial threat. They inhabited a completely fanciful world that is also easily recognisable as an archaic version of late-Victorian Britain. Reed poked gentle fun at contemporary institutions, ideas and events. It was a conservative view of the ancient past that endorsed late-Victorian ideas about gender, class and national identity. Reed’s images were especially popular in the colonies, where they were used to promote a British identity and erase indigenous peoples from local history. Reed’s impact on contemporaries is explored, especially American cartoonists whose imitative images finally popularised cave men in that country. Reed’s cartoons were also recreated on stage by professional and amateur performers in Britain and throughout the empire. Writers explored prehistory in literature. By the turn of the century, Reed’s unthreatening, middle class vision of prehistory predominated.

Mass culture: the Victorian world picture

This chapter explores aspects of nineteenth-century popular culture that contributed to the emergence of the cave man character. References are made to previous works from history, cultural and literary studies and the history of science. These show how long-standing ideas about the earth’s history were challenged by geological, archaeological and paleontological evidence of ancient and extinct mammals, dinosaurs and hominids. Elite ideas were popularised for a mass public by scientists themselves, and through evolutionary freak shows that exploited scientific controversies for profit. Increasingly, scientific ideas were generalised and disseminated by mass-market, heavily illustrated books and magazines. A new style of comic magazine introduced ‘cartoons’ which poked gentle fun at current sensations, as did an emerging entertainment industry centred on music hall, pantomime and other forms of popular theatre. New steam-powered transportation meant that books, magazines and performers travelled farther and faster than ever before. Britain was the hub of this new mass culture, both spreading and receiving ideas through a continuous, reciprocal dialogue with the emerging empire and America.

Modern times: the Victorian cave man’s long afterlife

This chapter shows that the war consolidated the cave man’s status as a global cultural character. Cave men have since been frequently depicted on stage, in films, in advertisements, literature, and more recently on television. Hollywood finally embraced the British conception of comic cave men in the 1920s. By then the character was so completely divorced from earlier evolutionary associations, that religious fundamentalists ignored it. The character has subsequently followed an almost unrelenting downward trajectory into b-movies, cheap comedies and cartoons, and productions that paraded hyper-sexualised women. The slide decelerated in 1960 when The Flintstones, the most influential depiction of cave men, debuted on American television. The series satirised middle-class, suburban America, in much the same spirit as E.T. Reed had once viewed Britain. The chapter concludes by briefly examining more recent depictions of cave men and prehistory in film and television to show that comedy predominates alongside healthy doses of action and attempts at scientific accuracy. Various examples are used to show that women continue to be portrayed in dismissive and overtly sexualised ways and that prehistory still denigrates and dismisses racial minorities. At the same time, the seemingly endless popularity and profitability of cave men films and television series mean that they will continue to be made for years.

The parents of Adam and Eve: missing links

This chapter argues that by the 1870s the popular idea of human prehistory in Britain had become fixated on the concept of the missing link, the as-yet undiscovered creature at the point where the evolutionary descent of humans and apes had split. British showmen and circus owners exploited this fascination by passing off all sorts of creatures as missing links, from actual monkeys to actors in disguise. The two most important missing links are analysed in detail: Pongo the first live gorilla seen in Europe, and Krao, a Burmese girl with congenital deformities. They were promoted in Britain with explicitly evolutionary language. Scientists scoffed, but the public clearly understood the deceit, which they accepted as entertaining and harmless. Pongo and Krao inspired cartoons and humorous songs. They were imitated on stage by acrobats and in pantomimes. And drawings of missing links were used in advertisements. Pongo and Krao were also the last important evolutionary freaks. The globe had been comprehensively explored, evolution and European prehistory were far better understood, and the increasingly commercialised entertainment industry strove for middle class respectability.

Darwin, Du Chaillu and Mr Gorilla: the lions of the season

This chapter explores how Charles Darwin’s 1859 book On the Origin of Species and the explorer Paul Du Chaillu’s almost simultaneous encounters with gorillas in West Africa focussed popular fears about evolution. Gorillas were a frightening suggestion that apes and humans were related, and that ancient hominids might still inhabit the unexplored parts of the Earth. Scientists and theologians publicly and angrily confronted each other, providing satirists with the basis for cartoons, songs, plays, stage sketches, acrobatic routines and literary fantasies about gorillas. These reflected a generalised knowledge about evolution. Cartoons, poems and jokes in humorous magazines adopted the gorilla’s voice, making the animal quasi-human and having it comment directly on the contemporary world. The almost invariably humorous tone in which gorillas were invoked in British popular culture deflected unease about the animal’s relationship to humans. Such ideas were far more threatening in the United States, where debates about the future of slavery were plunging the country into Civil War. Americans had little interest in comic depictions of simian prehistoric humans.

Conclusion

This short chapter is constructed around two cave men cartoons that were published in 2015. These are used to demonstrate the book’s conclusion that the cave man character in popular culture was established in late-Victorian Britain to show, in a gently mocking tone, that national ideals and institutions were superlative and immemorial. This has subsequently been expanded to suggest that Anglo-Saxon society has always been predominant. The character does not reflect scientific evidence or the controversies of the 1860s. These modern humans inhabit a conservative projection of the contemporary world in which its dominant values and ideas are unchallenged. This allows a broad audience to laugh, at itself, unselfconsciously.

Cave dwellers of Flanders: the First World War

This chapter argues that by the start of the First World War the cave man had become a global popular cultural character. During the war, propagandists, correspondents and men in uniform from throughout the empire and America used references to cave men to satirise their experiences and mitigate the horrors of modern warfare. Battlefields resembled ancient landscapes, while the humorous violence in cave man cartoons and films suggested that men might survive the trenches. Soldiers described new technologies like tanks as prehistoric monsters, depicted themselves as heroic cave men and their enemies as brutal, unevolved, simian missing links. Soldiers and civilians also watched cave man films by artists like Charlie Chaplin, while George Robey performed his prehistoric man character for a long-running London revue.

He of the auburn locks: George Robey, the Edwardian cave man

This chapter focuses on how George Robey, one of the most popular Edwardian comedians, created a sketch in 1902 based on E.T. Reed’s prehistoric peeps cartoons. The sketch, which Robey performed for years, firmly established the cave man as a theatrical character and inspired many professional and amateur imitators. Reed’s cartoons remained very popular and widely imitated. They were invoked to describe conditions in the empire and scientific evidence of the ancient past, while comic cave men were used to advertise a wide variety of commercial goods. The second part of this chapter explores how Reed’s cave man character was transferred to the cinema screen in 1905 with the first film ever set in prehistory. British cave man films inspired American filmmakers who initially eschewed comedy for action, supposed scientific truth and an alignment with national myths about rugged individualism.