We all started somewhere. There is some controversy over how this all began. My money is not on some garden where two people magically appeared, all nakers, snacking on apples and talking to snakes.
More than likely, we evolved. Like all the other species on this Earth, originally from a gooey glump of primordial soup. The information following points to one thing.
The main focus had been on the evolution of primates, especially where and how humans branched off in this whole process. Evidence suggests that the last common ancestor between humans and other apes was a species no longer around today. But it was ape- or chimp-like. Much like the chimpanzee of today.
So there we are.
Eventually, we earned the caveman status. Now isn’t that quite a thing? But old grandma and grandpa cave folks lived during the Stone Age, which, by the way, is the longest period in the human timeline.
You could take all the following time periods (to the modern day) together, multiply them several times, and the Stone Age would still be longer.
We are talking about close to a million years. (Around 925,000 years, to be more succinct.)
Our CavePappies and CaveMammas lived in an ice world surrounded by woolly beasts. It was chilly back then. Plants only grew, in an outburst, during the very brief days of a cold summer.
Most of them didn’t really take to caves. Instead, their homes were made of bones and hides. They made clothes from animal skins. They hunted with wooden spears and gathered berries in order to eat.
To put the “caveman” era in perspective, the civilization of Ice Age people — the ones we popularly know as cavemen — lived on the European continent 30,000 to 10,000 years ago. But the people before them came a LONG time before time. Our earliest ancestors made the first tools about 2 million years ago. In between, about 1.5 million years ago, Earth underwent a dramatic climatic cooling known as the Ice Age. So Cavemen are fairly new.
I mention all of this, because on this date, September 30, 1960, “The Flintstones” premiered on ABC. It was the first animated sitcom ever created. Hanna-Barbera did this.
Originally the Flinstones were called the Flagstones. Joe Barbera thought about calling the show The Gladstones. Nope. He then decided on The Flagstones. Nope again. He realized there was a comic strip with the same name.
So then there is this. Barney and Fred were drawn to resemble cave people. They started out wearing long beards with scraggly, unkempt hair. They were all hunched over and distorted in their shapes. Barbera didn’t like the designs. The artists went back to the drawing board and came up with the cutey versions we now know.
Pebbles was supposed to be a boy originally.
And Fred and Wilma were one of the first television couples to sleep in the same bed.
I like the Flinstone version of the caveman. I like the real version too. Because they are our ancestors. None of us would be here without those early club-carrying, scruffy-headed grunters.
I am thankful for them.
Yabba. Dabba. Doo.
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“We all carry, inside us, people who came before us.”
― Liam Callanan, The Cloud Atlas
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“You are the fairy tale told by your ancestors.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut
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“If you don’t know history, then you don’t know anything. You are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.”
— Michael Crichton
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Living in the cave or not. Flagstones.
