The truth about cavemen

GEICOCAVEMEN

Is that they only lived in caves seasonally, "maybe a couple of months a year at the most." At Nautilus, Jude Isabella interviews anthropological archaeologist Margaret Conkey, who sets the record straight.

Archaeologists are influenced by their culture, not surprisingly. We can’t be totally neutral—we’d be like a blob—but it’s important to recognize what biases we bring to our work. My colleagues and I are suggesting that we have certain biases about what constitutes a “home” and that mobile people didn’t think of home as a stationary physical structure. A “homeless” archaeologist would have a different perspective. Only instead of using the term “homeless,” which in our culture has a negative connotation, I use the term “spatially ambitious.” Clearly, based on what we found, our ancestors were way more spatially ambitious than the cavemen we had thought them to be.