The caveman myth

We're all familiar with the caveman myth. You know, the idea that the earliest humans all lived in caves, carried clubs, wore animal skins hung on one shoulder, and grunted back and forth to each other with intelligence only a bit higher than apes.

The ancients were smarter than a lot of folks give them credit for being. Not every ancient man lived in a cave and scratched his flea-infested armpit with hairy, dung-covered fingers - it just so happens that other homes the ancients lived in didn't last as long as the caves. So if the oldest human habitations we discover are caves, then all I can say is...duh! Do you expect an 5,000-yr-old straw house or animal-skin tent to still be standing in Mesopotamia? (Or a wood boat on Mt. Ararat?)

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