Hollywood Prehistory

Pfft, so inaccurate. Dinosaurs didn't drag their tails.

"Come with us back to the days of the caveman, when every woman wore furs, every man had a private club, and backyard barbecues were truly mammoth!"

— Kermit the Frog, The Muppet Show

The days when gruff, thick-browed, club-wielding cavemen and sexy cavewomen in body-baring fur teddies roamed the earth alongside non-avian dinosaurs. Most humans were of low intelligence and communicated primarily in grunts, but this didn't stop them from inventing a sophisticated system of Bamboo Technology, most of which incorporated rocks, sinews, and small dinosaurs who really didn't seem to mind the fact that they'd been locked under a counter and forced to serve as a primitive garbage disposal for the vast majority of their waking lives. ("It's a living," after all...) It's not uncommon for various versions of prehistoric humans, such as apes still barely down from the trees, brutal Frazetta Men, mostly modern-looking (and usually extremely attractive) tribal people and early agriculturalists experimenting with things like "wheels" and "fire" and "bronze", to share the world, variedly coexisting and fighting with one another. Even less realistic settings than usual can include Lizard Folk and Snake People, usually as shared antagonists for the various humans and near-humans.

These settings usually consist primarily of barren, rocky landscapes, usually dominated by the looming silhouettes of barren peaks or ever-smoking volcanoes. Breaks in this dominant terrain will almost invariably consist of dense jungles, primordial swamps, bubbling tar pits, and elaborate cave systems. More occasionally, barren fields of ice and snow may also turn up. The fauna will be a grab-bag of Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic species, with saber-toothed cats and woolly mammoths rubbing shoulders with dinosaurs and sail-backed reptiles while giant insects buzz past, pterosaurs wheel overhead and giant marine reptiles rule the seas. Given the low priority scientific realism plays in these stories, the beasts will often sport any number of unrealistic or outdated traits — tail-dragging dinosaurs still turn up from time to time, and don't expect to see a feather on any one of them (aside from the occasional Archaeopteryx, of course). Oftentimes, these will be full-on Prehistoric Monsters more similar to dragons and other fantastic beasts than to anything that ever lived on Earth.

Real "cavemen" were quite different — although of course, it entirely depends what point in prehistory you're focusing on. They (at least in the last 100,000 years or so) were as intelligent as modern humans (and maybe more) and had complex language. They used bows, spears, slings, and knives as well as clubs. They lived in tents or huts, sometimes structures built of mammoth bones, and maybe the mouths of caves but never deep inside. Most prejudices about cavemen were originally applied to Aboriginal Australians, pygmies, Native Americans, and black people, with claims they were closer to our ancestors (thus "less evolved" or more ape-like).

This setting is nowadays a Dead Horse Trope. If there's a specific year when it died, it would have to be 1981, in which it suffered the blow of two Genre-Killers. One was Quest for Fire, it being a much more realistic take on the lives of prehistoric humans, and the other was Caveman, it being a silly parody of the "cavemen and dinosaurs" genre. Between those two films, fur-clad cavemen battling stop-motion dinosaurs became something that audiences could no longer take seriously. Insofar as this setting turns up in media after 1981, it's always as either a parody of or homage to older works. And if it wasn't already dead in 1981, it was further killed a few years later with the advent of Dinosaur Renaissance media like The Land Before Time and Jurassic Park, which endeavored to portray dinosaurs with more scientific accuracy and certainly did away with any notion of them living alongside cavepeople, by establishing any mammals that lived with the dinosaurs as not more than small, scurrying creatures. The popularization of the idea that a meteor impact caused the extinction of the dinosaurs may have further contributed to this trope's decline, as did the growing popularity of the last ice age with its large prehistoric mammals (especially mammoths and saber-toothed cats) as a stark contrast to the dinosaurs and other reptiles which are usually associated with tropical or warmer climates.

See Prehistoria for a Video Game level or setting set here, and Age of Reptiles for this time period's typical rulers. Contrast with Lost World, another setting full of dinos and cavemen, but separated from the modern world by geography rather than time.

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Related tropes:

• All Cavemen Were Neanderthals
• Anachronistic Animal
• Artistic License – Paleontology
• Bamboo Technology
• Behemoth Battle
• The Discovery of Fire
• Domesticated Dinosaurs
• Frazetta Man
• Fur Bikini
• Handsome Heroic Caveman
• Inventing the Wheel
• Living Dinosaurs
• Medieval Prehistory
• Nubile Savage
• Original Man
• Prehistoric Monster
• Slurpasaur
• Stone Punk
• Terror-dactyl
• Whateversaurus

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Works with this setting:

Anime & Manga

• Ryu the Cave Boy: Humans and dinosaurs live in the same era and the setting is in a barren, rocky, depressing wasteland. In addition, there also exist carnivorous plants, and in the frosty areas, yeti. Many female characters like Ran and Messa dress as sexy cavewomen.

Asian Animation

• Happy Heroes: Season 6 introduces the planet Guling, which has several features making it much like a prehistoric setting such as inhabitants resembling cavemen who live in caves, alongside lots of dinosaurs living alongside them.

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Jund, one of the five Shards of Alara, is pretty clearly based on this trope, though it gets away with it by being pure fantasy. Actual dragons replace the dinosaurs, brutal reptilian humanoids lord it over tribes of primitive humans and ratlike goblins, and the land itself is dominated by ever-present, smoke-spewing volcanoes looming over chokingly dense jungles and festering tar pits.
  • Muraganda, a plane referenced in a number of cards but never visited directly in-story, is depicted as a place of deep jungles home to ferocious dinosaurs, Blob Monsters, "saurid warriors", and primal druids, mages and witches.

Comedy

• Otto employed this trope when he said that the Neanderthals started walking upright because they wanted to get their hands away from all that dinosaur shit.

Comic Books

• Avengers 1,000,000 BC has each member of this Avengers team except the god Odin, identifiable as being a modern human in appearance rather than the Neanderthals and Cro-magnons showing up in their Ice Age world. So way back in 1,000 000 BC there were proto-Tibetan temples and African empires as these Avengers battled demons, angry gods, a Cosmic Entity and time-travelling criminals in prehistory.
• Garfield: His 9 Lives: Garfield lived his first life as a sabretooth cat in a world of barren soil and volcanic peaks. The animated special takes one step further with a parody of creatures emerging fully formed from the sea.
  Narrator: In those days, the first everything was crawling up out of the sea: the first snake. The first chicken. Crab grass. The first real estate salesman.
• Marvel Comics: Devil Dinosaur is about a young hominid (Moon-Boy) who befriends a mutant T. Rexpy after rescuing him from more savage hominids, with Jack Kirby claiming "After all, just where the Dinosaur met his end, and when Man first stood reasonably erect, is still shrouded in mystery." Later writers have established that the characters actually come from a parallel world where dinosaurs never went extinct.
• Monica's Gang: The Pitheco stories are largely influenced by this setting and are homages to the genre, starring the titular caveman (whose full name is "Pithecanthropus erectus da Silva" ^note Silva being the Brazilian equivalent of Smith). He lives in a prehistoric village called Lem (the name itself being a parody of Lemuria) in a world of barren soil with volcanoes in the background, in which humans coexist with non-avian dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts and live in caves. Older stories from Pitheco were even more focused on fantasy elements, featuring Cyclops, wizards and other fantastical creatures. This also applies to the Horace stories, a mellow and philosophical vegetarian baby T. rex who started as a character in the Pitheco strips and interacts with several other animals from different periods.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): In "From the Shadows", when Shadow Lock's magic traps the main characters in miniature worlds based off of museum exhibits, Pinkie and Applejack are sent into one based on Equestria's prehistoric era. There, they find a jungle-covered, volcanic landscape where dinosaurs and thick-browed, slow-minded cave-ponies live together.
• The Sandman (1989): One page mentions out of hand that not only is humanity several million years older than the fossil record indicates, but there are a little less than five hundred living immortals who remember the dinosaurs.
• Tragg and the Sky Gods: The setting features cavemen battling dinosaurs and alien invaders.
• Jurassic League: The setting is a homage to this type of genre with dinosaur versions of the Justice League and prehistoric humans being shown living at the same time.

Comic Strips

• B.C. takes place in a world of barren plains and rocky mountains home to cavemen dressed in tailored pelts, the occasional dinosaur, and a variety of Intellectual Animals. It also seems to be taking place in a bizarre Alternate Universe filled with modern humor and Fundamentalist Christianity. Johnny Hart was a (young-earth) creationist, so he may have actually believed dinosaurs roamed the earth with cavemen.
• Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin's dinosaur Imagine Spots early in the strip's run are set in a vaguely jungle-like landscape where tail-dragging tyrannosaurs coexist with cavemen and sabre-toothed tigers. These were phased out as Bill Watterson did more research on dinosaurs, and afterwards only depicted animals together which would've actually coexisted, and with more accurate anatomy.
• The Far Side: Gary Larson occasionally depicts tail-dragging dinosaurs and neckless, hulking, heavy-browed cavemen together, typically in barren, rocky landscapes and the occasional jungle, and not without some shame on his part, even though it was for the sake of humor. In The Prehistory of the Far Side anthology, he suggests that "there should be cartoon confessionals where we could go and say things like, 'Father, I have sinned — I have drawn dinosaurs and hominids together in the same cartoon.'"
• Prehistoric Peeps, an 1890s cartoon series drawn by Edward Tennyson Reed and published in Punch!, may be the Trope Maker. It depicts cavemen living with dinosaurs in a primeval imitation of contemporary Victorian society. Even in the 1890s, paleontologists were perfectly aware that dinosaurs and humans never lived together, but Rule of Funny obviously applies here. The comic received a cinematic adaptation in 1905, but it's now a lost film.

Commercials

• The American Dental Association used to air commercials featuring a character named Dudley the Dinosaur, who promoted dental health. The character lives in an anachronistic setting where all the characters are anthropomorphic prehistoric creatures, including dinosaurs, mammoths, and saber-toothed cats.
• Nissin Noodles: The 90s commercials with ridiculously tiny cavemen hunting various prehistoric beasts like woolly mammoths and giant pterosaurs in a wasteland.
• This FedEx Super Bowl commercial shows a caveman trying to send a delivery by Pteranodon... which promptly gets eaten by a T. rex. The caveman's manager then suggests the titular mail service, only for his subordinate to complain that "FedEx doesn't exist yet". The caveman then kicks a Troodontid dinosaur out of frustration, only to get crushed by a sauropod's Giant Foot of Stomping.

Films — Animation

• The Croods takes place in the fictional Croodacious period, where a family of cavemen meet a Cro-Magnon inventor with fairly modern ideas and gadgets. There are no dinosaurs, but there are bizarre Mix-and-Match Critters implied to be missing links of modern species.
• Dinosaur has lemurs take the place of cavemen coexisting with dinosaurs.
• Early Man is about a tribe of Stone Age cavemen fighting against villains from the more advanced Bronze Age. It's a huge Anachronism Stew, with the plot hinging on a soccer match. A prologue featuring their ape-like ancestors is set in the "neo-Pleistocene" era, the very day dinosaurs went extinct.
• The Good Dinosaur takes place in a world where dinosaurs never became extinct due to the asteroid missing the Earth this time, with the main plot involving a young Apatosaurus befriending a caveboy and keeping him as a pet, before trying to help him reunite with his family.

Films — Live-Action

• 10,000 BC: Replace cavemen and dinosaurs with cavemen, Ice Age beasts, and pyramid-building Egyptians and you get this movie. It's an obvious homage to One Million Years BC, and adopts the same "eh, whatever" attitude towards accuracy. Some dinosaurs do still factor, with the Cenozoic Era's own apex predatory dinosaurs, the terror birds, appearing in a sequence that intentionally evokes the Raptor Attack trope.
• Brute Force (a 1914 Silent Movie by D. W. Griffith, also known as The Primitive Man, In Prehistoric Days, and War of the Primal Tribes) is probably the earliest surviving film to depict cavemen and dinosaurs living together. This mainly consists of a brief scene with a Ceratosaurus, which is announced by an intertitle reading, "one of the perils of prehistoric apartment life." The majority of the film's plot concerns two primitive tribes fighting over women. Notably, the women are clothed in grass dresses rather than the now-customary Fur Bikinis, which probably wouldn't have met with 1914 standards of female modesty. Besides, bikinis hadn't been invented yet.
• Carry On Cleo depicts the Britons as dinosaur-hunting cavepeople at the time of the Roman Empire. Rule of Funny applies, obviously.
• Noah suggests there were dog-sized dinosaurs with dog-like behavior that coexisted with humans before being wiped out by the flood.
• One Million B.C. and its 1967 remake titled One Million Years B.C. may be the combined Trope Codifier. The 1967 version is chiefly remembered for the sight of Raquel Welch in a Fur Bikini. Ray Harryhausen, who animated most of the dinosaurs in the remake, comments that he did not make One Million Years B.C. for "professors... who probably don't go to see these kinds of movies anyway." Both movies are essentially love stories set against a prehistoric backdrop, with Handsome Heroic Caveman Tumak being expelled from the brutal Rock Tribe and falling in love with Nubile Savage Loana (Welch in the remake) of the gentler Shell Tribe.
• Tyranno's Claw is a Korean take on the genre, set in the Jeulmun pottery period with most of the film revolving around a cavemen tribe worshipping a T. rex as their god. Plenty of prehistoric monsters appears as well, including a pterodactyl trying to feed the heroes to its young and a friendly Triceratops.
• When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth: A thematic follow-up to Hammer's earlier One Million Years B.C., the movie features a love story across different caveman clans and tons of stop-motion dinosaurs.
• Year One features Hunter Michael Cera and Gatherer Jack Black as cavemen gatecrashing Biblical-narrative events. The problem is that, while the story of Cain and Abel could be set in prehistory, early Israelites like Abraham are much less so. And then there's those Romans showing up. Anachronism Stew all around!
• Yor: The Hunter from the Future starts this way, complete with dinosaurs, giant lizards, women in furskin bikinis and barbarian heroes, only for it to be subverted with it being in fact a Future Primitive world After the End, not a prehistoric one. This makes the presence of dinosaurs even more confusing.

Literature

• Before Adam, a historical novel by Jack London, is the story of a man who dreams he lives the life of an early australopithecine. The majority of the story is told through the eyes of the man's hominid alter ego, one of the Cave People. In addition to the Cave People, there are the more advanced Fire People and the more animal-like Tree People. Other characters include the hominid's father, a love interest, and Red-Eye, a fierce "atavism" that perpetually terrorizes the Cave People. A sabre-cat also plays a role in the story.
• The Evolution Man is set in a fictionalized version of prehistoric Africa, following a family of early hominids who are in some manner aware of the fact that they are still relatively primitive and are actively attempting to evolve towards Homo sapiens. Among other things, the story features characters discussing their precise location on the geologic timescale, recalcitrant Uncle Vania who refuses to move past the ape-man stage, hominids running the gamut from largely modern people to hoary Frazetta Men, the invention of cave paintings, religion, fire, cooking and clothing, unsuccessful attempts at domesticating the dog and a running commentary on the evolution of humanity and the Earth.
• Fartago, a blog novel, is set at around the time Homo habilis, the first Hominid species, gained awareness. However, much of the novel's references underscore the fact that most portrayals of these early Hominid species portray them as a lot like us, but minor references in the novel prove the writer, Tony Caroselli, actually knows what he's talking about and is only making stuff up for comedy's sake.
• Quest for Fire (the source material for the aforementioned film) is a 1911 novel by J-H Rosny set 100,000 years ago. It concerns a tribe of neanderthals who lose their coveted fire and must battle hostile tribes and prehistoric beasts to get it back. It has aged better than most other examples as many of the author's speculations (multiple human species living contemporaneously, a race of dwarf humans and giant pleistocene apes) have turned out to be accurate.

Live-Action TV

• Bones: Booth trolls Bones once by claiming that it's a "fact" that cavemen fought Tyrannosaurus rex. Bones is unable to tell if he's kidding or not, but hopes he is.
• Doctor Who:
  • "An Unearthly Child", the first story of the original series, sees the characters travel to prehistory and encounter a tribe of cannibalistic cavemen looking for the secret of fire. No dinosaurs, however.
  • "Doctor Who and the Silurians": The backstory is that the Silurians domesticated dinosaurs and enslaved early hominids, despite the Silurian era being hundreds of millions of years too early for either of these, or indeed anything resembling Lizard Folk. "The Sea Devils" has the Doctor claim that this is "a complete misnomer" (and never mind that he used it at the time) and they should actually be "Eocenes", which is ... better, but not by much (you can fudge the dinosaurs surviving somehow, and at least primates existed, if not hominids).
• Ghosts (UK): This trope is averted as the prehistoric flashbacks in “Not Again” don’t feature dinosaurs living alongside cavemen.
• It's About Time: The astronauts Captain Mackenzie and Lieutenant Canfield accidentally break the time barrier and get stranded in One Million B.C. alongside dinosaurs, prehistoric flora and fauna, and cavepeople speaking broken English. Eventually, Mackenzie and Canfield go back to the future, bringing with them a family that they befriended.
• Land of the Lost (1974): Justified. The titular Land is an abandoned alien zoo, explaining the mix of dinosaurs from various eras and the Sleestak lost civilization.
• Land O'Hands: The titular land is a prehistoric world where cavepeople live with dinosaurs and ice age animals... that are made with Bare-Handed Puppetry.
• Power Rangers Time Force: Played absolutely straight in the "search for the Quantasaurus Rex" arc, where Wes and Eric see Triceratops and Stegosaurus and get chased by an irate Tyrannosaurus, before Wes finds fairly advanced wall-paintings of the aforementioned Quantasaurus Rex.

Music

• The Iron Maiden song "Quest For Fire" depicts a world of cavemen and dinosaurs, but mainly focuses on the cavemen.

Pinball

• The Flintstones: As it is based on the popular cartoon, this is also set in the distant past where cavemen live alongside dinosaurs.

Puppet Shows

• Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock: In the Christmas Episode The Night of Lights, there's a flashback to the World's Oldest Fraggle's childhood, when Fraggles wore caveman-style outfits, radishes were as big as Gorgs, and the Rock's wildlife included sabretoothed Inkspots and mammoth versions of the little elephant-like creatures.

Tabletop Games

• GURPS:
  • Lands Out of Time introduces the "World of Banded Night", which includes dinosaurs, cavemen, ape-men, even lizard-men and the ruins of an ultra-tech civilization.
• Paleomythic, by Osprey Publishing, is a Low Fantasy game set eons in the past on Ancient Mu, a Pangaea-like supercontinent that has every sort of climate and ecosystem. The best material is flint or obsidian, otherwise you'll be settling for bone and hide. While dinosaurs are extinct (closest thing are giant lizards the size of elephants), Ice Age mammals such as mammoths and beardogs still live and thrive. Besides these mundane if exotic animals, there are also several Beast Man varieties and ghosts and animal spirits to contend with. It's Sword and Sorcery without the heavy metal, exotic castles and high-powered sorcerers.
• Planegea is essentially the prehistory of a Standard Fantasy Setting like Forgotten Realms. Humans and early versions of other fantasy races survive in a primordial world that is still in the process of being formed.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Cretacia, the homeworld of the Flesh Tearer Space Marines, is based primarily on this trope. The planet is an untamed Death World covered in dense jungles and steaming swamps, home to ferocious reptilian predators the size of a small mecha, even bigger herbivores capable of crushing Marines underfoot without even noticing, blood-drinking insects the size of a grown man, and tribes of primitive, savage humans descended from ancient colonists who tried to tame the planet.
  • Dark Heresy: Gregorn is a feral world distinctly themed around this model. The planet itself is humid, tropical, and very tectonically active, resulting in a sprawl of unstable continents that grind against each other to form tangled ranges of volcanoes and calderas. Thanks to the humid air, constant storms, and rich minerals stirred up by tectonic upheavals, every available patch of ground is covered by dense rainforests hundreds of meters deep, which are home to immense saurian herbivores hunted by predators such as carnidons, bipedal reptiles the size of tanks, and mora, giant flightless birds. Also present here are primitive human clans and tribal kingdoms, alongside a strong Ork presence.

Video Games

• Choice of Games: In Silverworld, eleven million years in the past, the Stone Age River People contend with the dinosaur-riding ophidians and their horrifying monster, the Tyrant.
• Chrono Trigger: 65,000,000 BC has all the expected features — bow-legged cavemen and a hot cavewoman who speak in You No Take Candle, who coexist with dinosaurs. The twist was that the dinosaurs are a civilized race who are in the middle of a stated war of racial survival with the humans.
• Live A Live: The Prehistoric Scenario has more or less all the boxes ticked off: it's the only scenario with no actual dialogue, with the characters instead using body language and, at most, the occasional Pictorial Speech-Bubble. The cavemen, excluding the protagonist and The Heavy of the scenario, are all club-wielding Gonks with big round noses and raggedy hair, and the one female human shown (despite there being two tribes shown, all of them are men) is a Nubile Savage with few clothes. Humans don't live alongside dinosaurs, most of the enemies are prehistoric non-dinosaur animals that are slightly more accurate. The notable exception is the final boss of the scenario: Odo, a T. rex worshipped as a divinity and implied to be the last of the dinosaurs. As it's the most comedic of all the scenarios, it doesn't really have to be in any shape or form accurate.
• Roots of Pacha, a Farm Life Sim that takes place in prehistoric times, is fully aware that it takes liberties with its portrayal of the period. It begins with a disclaimer that the setting is meant to invoke the feel of the era and is not meant to represent "any specific culture, geography, or time period".
• War Party has primitive humans with neolithic technology interacting with and riding dinosaurs as well as ice age mammals.

Webcomics

• Dawn of Time stars a cavegirl and her Triceratops companion.
• El Goonish Shive: In one strip, Nanase fantasizes about her current girlfriend being jealous of her former suitors in the form of her as a club-wielding Nubile Savage in leopard pelts beating up other cavemen in a volcanic prehistory as a pterosaur flies overhead.

Western Animation

• DuckTales (1987): In "Time is Money", Scrooge travels back to 1 Million BC to find a land in which caveducks coexist with dinosaurs. Fridge Brilliance: It makes sense that in a world of intelligent anthropomorphic birds their ancestors did interact with dinosaurs.
• The Flintstones is one of the most iconic examples in Western animation, with civilized cavepeople living in a world full of dinosaurs, mammoths, pterosaurs, sabertooth cats, and other creatures, often being used in place of modern appliances. Eh, it's a living!
• Gertie the Dinosaur: Gertie the sauropod lives in a landscape of barren rocks inhabited by herself, a woolly mammoth, and a few Prehistoric Monsters more similar to medieval dragons than anything else.
• Goof Troop: "Clan of the Cave Goof" features the prehistoric ancestors of Goofy and Pete in a Flintstones-esque world of cave people, dinosaurs, and Stone Age equivalents of modern inventions.
• Looney Tunes has had several shorts of this type:
  • "Prehistoric Porky" takes place in One Billion, Trillion B.C. and shows Cavepig Porky's near-fatal chase with a saber-tooth tiger.
  • "Daffy and the Dinosaur" takes place "millions and billions and trillions of years ago" and shows a caveman hunting Daffy Duck.
  • In Pre-Hysterical Hare, Bugs Bunny finds a caveman's documentary about life in 10,000 B.C., which happens to feature a caveman version of Elmer Fudd trying to hunt a prehistoric version of Bugs.
• Love, Death & Robots: In "Ice Age", after the fridge is unplugged and thawed out and its miniature world's development is reset, it becomes home to primitive, Australopithecus-like apemen sharing a tropical landscape with scaly dinosaurs.
• Mickey Mouse (2013): "Outta Time" has Mickey and Donald use a time machine (It's a Long Story) to visit this setting and rescue Goofy, who had accidentally used the same time machine earlier. The objective was to bring Goofy back to the present day before all life became descended from him, and it shows — thanks to Goofy's presence, the dinosaurs and cavemen all have Goofy heads.
• Mr. Benn: In "Caveman", Mr. Benn visits a stone-age community who live right next to a dusty and dangerous road, frequented by dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, but want to live in the fresh green countryside. There's just one problem: there are no caves. Mr Benn has the answer: they can build stone huts.
• Oh Yeah! Cartoons: The 11-minute short "Fathead" involves cavemen coexisting with dinosaurs, the plot concerning the titular character having to complete a rite of passage that requires taking a dinosaur egg.
• Phineas and Ferb: "Tri-Stone Area" is set in prehistoric times and involves cavemen versions of Phineas And Ferb inventing the wheel. Meanwhile, Bunka de Bunkakwan (Perry the Platypus) must stop Doofengung (Doofenshmirtz) from using his stick to poke the mammoths to destroy Roger's home. Even though almost the entirety of this episode has the characters as completely unintelligible cave people, it's still very easy to tell what's being said based on the show's plot structure and very common Running Gags.
• Primal (2019) is set at the vaguely-defined "dawn of evolution", with a caveman as the main protagonist. The Anachronism Stew and artistic license of this trope are gleefully embraced; dinosaurs, humans and other animals from various geologic periods coexist (as well as completely fictional creatures such as a Giant Spider) and there’s zero attempt to make the prehistoric animals look realistic, with most looking like something you'd see in an old Ruby-Spears cartoon. It's a prehistoric world that runs on pure, undistilled Rule of Cool. Midway through Season 1, the show reveals the existence of full-blown magic, firmly establishing the setting as a pure fantasy world and potentially explaining the most impossible aspects.
• The Smurfs (1981): Season 9 begins with the Smurfs traveling to the prehistoric past to bring a baby dinosaur home, and encountering an evil cave child that captures Clumsy and uses him for the "magic power" he possesses of being able to start a fire.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: "Ugh" is set in a prehistoric Bikini Bottom featuring cavemen versions of Spongebob (Spongegar), Patrick (Patar), and Squidward (Squog). The live-action Framing Device hosted by Patchy the Pirate in the stone age features both a caveman and a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
• The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!: "Quest for Pizza" is set in "Cavemanland", a prehistoric world populated by cavemen and dinosaurs, or at least dinosaur-like versions of Mario enemies.
• Super Mario World (1991) runs with the fact that the game is set in a place called Dinosaur Land and has the show set in the Stone Age, populating the place with lots of cavemen, including Oogtar the Not-Toad, and a variety of dinosaurs and dinosaur-like monsters.
• Tex Avery MGM Cartoons: "The First Bad Man" mixes a cartoonishly inaccurate version of caveman life with Wild West tropes as it tells the story of the first outlaw in Texas, Dinosaur Dan.
• Valley of the Dinosaurs: Played with. On the one hand, the valley people and the neighboring tribes live in caves in a land where dinosaurs and other pre-human animals are still running around. However, except for the pre-human animals and the fact that everyone speaks English, it actually depicts early cave people rather realistically, from the way they look and dress, to their government and lifestyle. The valley people and neighboring tribes actually seem to be living like how many Native American tribes once did (besides the whole "living in caves" thing).
• The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: "Have Time, Will Travel" features Ronald McDonald and friends time-traveling to the prehistoric era, which is shown to have dinosaurs co-existing with caveman counterparts to the McDonaldland gang. Hamburglar actually brings up that this wasn't how things actually were in prehistoric times and attributes it to something being wonky with Dr. Quizzical's time machine.

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