Cave Men to Thrive into 2015 More than Ever in Human History

What were the "Cave Men" like? Answer: YOU. Don't take offense. I know, the term conjures up images of primitive ape-like caricatures even less brainy than shirtless dudes from online FAIL videos. I see it differently, though. I imagine the average cave men to have really been smarter than the guys from fail videos. Those guys wouldn't have lived long enough to reproduce.

We need to define what a caveman is. Simple, a person who lives in a cave. Right now, more people live in caves than ever before! 30 million cave dwellers live in China alone today. So we'll say, cave dwellers from the dawn of history.

In ancient times, there lived a race of people, the cave men. Nobody knows who dey were, or what dey were doing. But their legacy lives on, hewn in the ancient walls... of the caves.

In the so-called days of the cavemen - fewer than 5 million people lived on the whole earth. Most of them did not live in caves, and even if they were ape-like, which I doubt, apes live in forests not caves.

And where are they now? The little children of the cave? And what would they say to us if we were here today?

Depicting our ancestors who lived in caves as stupid brutes is so racist. Well, I'm not sure if you can be racist against your ancestors. Anyway, I would accuse them of being daft for building a house next to a perfectly habitable cave. What a waste of time. Besides, they probably kicked some bear ass to occupy that cave, and without PKP Pechenegs and flash grenades. Gotta respect that.

Of course the cave has to be cleaned out and decorated. Surely a job for the woman, but that's not to say we've become any different nowadays. You know, that's how hunting was invented, when it's time to clean out the guano from the cave, the caveman suddenly has to go out and hunt. Math was invented when he calculated how many days the "hunt" would have to last to be sure the cave would be clean already upon his return. Of course, he couldn't return empty handed either, so he became an engineer and made animal traps.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph are the family of families. They had the best of both worlds, and I'm not talking about heaven and earth, but where they dwelt. Their humble abode was a house backed up against a cave, which is economical brilliance. Really, that's how I see humanity anyway, something ordered by design that transitions to a more natural but useful, and permanent structure in the back, hidden from view.

Anyone with a basement, wine cellar, or even bomb shelter is a true cave man, because you've made your own. Who can say the ancient people didn't often build a structure, a door at least, at the mouth of the cave that has since rotted away? Perhaps they didn't have to build doors to lock against intruders? Maybe they reasoned in favor of the germicidal and health-related benefits of sunlight vs. building an enclosure locking them in daytime darkness and burning candles and torches as sources of light.

Speculation is a dangerous thing. If you weren't there, how can you definitively say how things were. Lack of evidence doesn't preclude something from existing. If ancient people, as I believe to be true, were as smart or perhaps even smarter than people today, they would have survived and even thrived in harsh environments, mastered basic chemistry, engineering, and agriculture. They would have built civil societies, traded goods, and developed seafaring vessels to inhabit the world.

What remains from them are artifacts of stone and bone. Cloth, weavings, music, speeches, vocal works of art, instruments of wood, etc. don't survive thousands of years, just bones and stones do. So in the brilliance of modern-day intellect, we depict them ALWAYS banging bones around standing on or squatting near stone. Will future archaeologists imagine we wore metal parts as clothing, and lived in crumbled steel-reinforced concrete structures devoid of colorful paints?