We can’t seem to get over our obsession with the caveman, who
has appeared on screen since at least 1912. In fact,
anthropologist Judith Berman has written that a new caveman
character has been introduced into pop culture every year since
World War II. DreamWorks’ The Croods, directed by Chris Sanders
and Kirk De Micco, presents the most recent version of
prehistoric man; Grug, is a responsible father facing such dad-
like issues as a teenage daughter who just wants to be her own
person. He transcends the behavior expected of a typical
caveman, but his character design doesn’t evolve past a
stereotype that is largely of our own making. We’ve distilled an
entire subspecies of human down to a single iconic image, one
that is perpetuated year after year through film, animation,
comic art and bad Halloween costumes. The caveman is always
brutish, dressed in some type of fur loin cloth and possessing
limited intelligence. Some stereotypes of prehistoric humans are
certainly based on archeological facts: the structu