Or cavewoman. Or is it caveperson? I am not sure gender-neutral language mattered too much ten thousand years ago.
Actually, if we are being completely specific, people didn’t tend to live in caves back then. The operative word there is “people”. I know that we like to think we are sophisticated creatures – the very pinnacle of evolution – but neurologically, we are barely different from our hunter/gatherer forebears.
500 generations – which is all it is – is a drop in the evolutionary ocean when it comes to a complex creature like a human being. I read something, somewhere, sometime ago (so it must be true) that suggested if you could go back in time and take a new born baby from a cave-family, then it would grow up in the modern world with no discernible disadvantage.
Now, I can think of better things to do with a time machine than go baby snatching (I might hang around Bethlehem around Christmas a couple of millennia ago and see what transpires), but it sounds like a reasonable conclusion to me.
Evolution suggests (if you’ll excuse the over-simplification) that creatures develop to fit their environment over countless millennia, which means that the human of ten thousand years ago was created to live a hunter/gatherer life. And this means, in turn, the evolution has not developed us to live the way we live today.
We were not designed to sit at desks, stare at screens, worry about mortgages and pensions, sit in traffic jams, argue with strangers that we will never meet…
And I find myself wondering if there was ever such a thing as a depressed cave man.