Cavemen and Dinosaurs in Old Time Radio

The people we commonly refer to as cavemen generally did not live in caves. Those people, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon Man, were primarily nomadic hunter-gatherers who would have used tent-like structures for shelter, or perhaps wooden sheds. They may have taken temporary shelter in a cave if they could find one, but they would have moved on to follow the game they were hunting. Artifacts left in caves, however, tend to be much better preserved than those left in the open.

The caveman label comes from Cro-Magnon Man, which is the earliest recognized fossils of modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens. Cro-Magnon refers to the location where the earliest fossils were discovered, Abri de Cro-Magnon in southwestern France. "Abri" and "Cro" are terms that mean "shelter made from a hole in the rock", and Magnon is the family who owned the land where the fossils were discovered. The term currently preferred in the scientific literature for Cro-Magnon is "Early European Modern Humans" or EEMH. Neanderthal Man, Homo neanderthalis, were contemporaries of EEMH, and they are also named for the region where their fossils were first discovered, the Neander Valley in Germany.

The cartoonish image of cavemen shows them living with dinosaurs. Most eight-year-olds have a greater knowledge of dinosaurs than the scientific community did during the Golden Age of Radio. In fact, nobody had even heard of dinosaurs until the mid-Nineteenth century. The earliest Cro-Magnon fossils are around 45 thousand years old, but the last dinosaurs died out more than 200 million years ago. (Or did they? Modern scientific thought indicates that the hen who laid the egg you had for breakfast may be closely related to Tyrannosaurus Rex!)

• Evil Ivan Shark has managed to trap Captain Midnight and the Secret Squadron in the jungle when "Ivan Shark Returns". They take refuge up a tree when they are surrounded by a band of unwitting cavemen who have become Shark's minions. The cavemen are distracted when a great iguanodon wanders out of the jungle.
• Dinosaurs in Wistful Vista? Fibber McGee thinks that he has found a fossil bone in his backyard, and Professor von Klienmetz confirms that the bone is from a terrible tyrannosaurus. Or maybe it was a brontosaurus. Perhaps a thesaurus?
• Sometimes it is hard to get to the basement of a department store. That is where they store the unused seasonal displays, mannequins, merchandise, and records. Sometimes there is a sub-basement and it is rumored that there is a small railroad to deliver merchandise. According to Lights Out, the "Sub-Basement" may be filled with dinosaurs!
• Three companions are riding their bicycles in the Pyrenees mountains when a sudden rainstorm hits. They take refuge in a hidden cave. The girl takes her flashlight and explores deeper into the cave, and discovers a footprint in the stone near a hole, left there 20,000 years ago by a Cro-Magnon man. When one of the companions falls down the hole, he discovers "The World's Oldest Man" on Quiet Please.
• In one of the earliest surviving complete Tarzan serials, "The diamond of Asher", the King of the Jungle has to battle a tyrannosaurus and a pterodactyl to get to the treasure!
• We think that dinosaurs only existed in the misty depths of the ancient past, but Tom Corbett, Space Cadet discovers a tyrannosaurus in the jungles of the planet Venus.
• When Buzz Corry and Happy of Space Patrol land on mysterious Planet X beyond the reaches of the solar system they hear a strange bellow that turns out to be the call of a one-hundred-ton dinosaur in "The Menace of Planet X". In "The Monster from the Past", a time traveling criminal strands Buzz and Happy one-hundred-and-forty-million years in the past during the time of the dinosaurs.
• There is more time-travel afoot on X Minus One when a safari guide leads hunting expeditions to the past, but he rejects some clients for being too small in stature to handle a rifle big enough to bag a dinosaur in "A Gun for Dinosaur". In "Project Mastodon" a group of adventurers develops a Time Unit to travel back to the Pleistocene and establish the Republic of Mastodonia, and then they send a representative back to seek diplomatic recognition from the United States.