Photo by Alain Levitt
The earliest caveman (hominid) fossils were found in Aramis, Ethiopia, in 1994. The people who found them dated them back to 4.4 million B.C., but after looking at them more closely they found out the fossils were actually from 5.8 million B.C. That’s 1.4 million years older than they were originally dated.
While these fossils are the oldest evidence of the first-ever cavemen, I think that there were probably hundreds and thousands of cavemen living on earth millions of years before that. I think that there were probably cavemen with wings, and maybe also a species covered in scales. The laws of probability alone should convince you. There were probably as many types of cavemen as there were dinosaurs.
My favorite early man would have to be Ramapithecus. He used to be considered a possible ancestor of humans, but later fossil finds indicated that Ramapithecus was more closely related to the orangutan. Not a real caveman, but very intriguing anyway.
I recently did an interview with a new heavy metal group called Early Man. Though they sound like Black Sabbath with bigger balls, they don’t know shit.
VICE: We’ll start easy. Who would win a fight between a Cro-Magnon and a Neanderthal?
Mike (guitar and voice): If by Cro-Magnon you mean David Lee Roth, and by Neanderthal you mean Sammy Hagar, we’re going with Roth.
Disappointing. The answer was Neanderthal. Each one was as strong as five apes. Second question: What does Homo Habilis mean in English?
“Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
I don’t get it. Can you at least tell me who were the first early men to bury their dead with ceremonies?
No.
Did you know that the cavemen made music with flutes fashioned from the hollow femur bone of a bear…
There are no fucking flutes in metal except for Emporor intros. Look, we aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel and I know this is a free magazine and all and I like that, but is there any way we can come up with a half-coherent question?
Early Man is a new metal band from New York who are going to release a full-length in the spring on Record Collection Music. Matt Peel won’t be working with us again.
