Contemporary Caveman

Rawr! Art by *TheOtherCraftLord on Deviant ART.

A caveman in a modern-day setting. He either is an unfrozen Human Popsicle or got here through Time Travel. If he's capable of speech, expect Hulk Speak; if not, grunting is the way to go. Occasionally, this is subverted by having the caveman speak in interesting prose, usually with an upper-class English accent.

If they are able to fit in, then they are The Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer.

Note that the redirect title, "Freezetta Man", is a play on Frazetta Man, which is a certain type of caveman.

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Examples of Contemporary Caveman include:

Comic Books

• The titular character from the Archie's Weird Mysteries special "The Archies in Jugman". He was unfrozen when a geothermal heating system was installed in Riverdale High School.
• Anthro, The DCU's first boy, was frozen in a block of ice in Tales of the Unexpected, and thawed gradually. As it turns out, he speaks only French. Of course. (This is contradicted by Final Crisis, where he becomes an old man and dies in his original time period. Of course, the Dr Thirteen story in TotE was so meta, it's hard to imagine it as proper Canon.)
  • Another unfrozen caveman, Java, is the main Mook for Corrupt Corporate Executive Simon Stagg, a regular thorn in the side of Metamorpho.
  • Also in The DCU is the immortal Vandal Savage, much more sophisticated and urbane than pretty much anyone else on this page (he's become quite the gentleman and genius in his thousands of years), but still rather hairy.
    • And he still might kill you with his bare hands. And then eat you.
  • One more DCU example, Gnaark, introduced in a time travel story in Teen Titans #38, and later a member of Titans West.
  • In 1959, Bill Finger wrote "The Caveman from Krypton" in Worlds Finest (Vol. 1, #102) about a Kyptonian caveman who was frozen in molten lava(!) and was blasted to Earth when Krypton exploded. Initially brutal, he began to warm up to Superman and Batman but died in the end of the story.
• Marvel comics had a couple also.
  • The primarily Alpha Flight villain, the Master of the World, was a tribal hunter gatherer in prehistoric North America before being experimented on by the Plodex
  • Taras Vol, a one issue character from an issue of Cable, was an immortal caveman diner owner.

Film

• The earliest in film is probably from 1960's Dinosaurus!.
• In Encino Man, a caveman is discovered frozen in a block of ice in Californian teenager Dave's backyard while he and a friend, Stoney, are digging a swimming pool. The heater thaws the ice while they're at school. Stoney and Dave find out that he's made a mess of the house, so they dress and clean him up. They bring him to school as a foreign exchange student (Linkavitch Chomofsky, aka Link), where he becomes popular. At the end of the movie, a cavewoman, Link's mate, is found taking a bath at Dave's house.
  • This was followed up in the Made for TV Movie sequel, Encino Woman.
• The eponymous caveman from the B-Movie Eegah. Unlike the others, he's extraordinarily long-lived and the Last of His Kind.
• Charlie, of the unfrozen type, in the film Iceman. Unlike most examples here, the results are portrayed fairly realistically.
• Night at the Museum (The Movie): The people and animals in the museum exhibits come alive every night, among them some Neanderthals.
• Subverted in Luggage Of The Gods!: A group of cavemen live in the mountainous area of South America, separate from our world around them. They find fallen airplane luggage and their economy capsizes.
• Rare female example: Tahra in Bikini Cavegirl is transported to the future by mistake.
• Another one is the Italian film "Mia moglie è una bestia" ("My Wife's a Beast"), where a guy finds a beautiful frozen cavewoman, and re-animates her, believing her to be one of the guests at the costume party he attended before.
• Discussed and subverted in The Man From Earth, in which the main character is an immortal caveman who, having changed with the times, talks and acts like everyone else.

Literature

• Isaac Asimov's short story "The Ugly Little Boy" featured a caveman child who came to our time thanks to time travel experiments done by a research organization.
• "The Resurrection of Jimber Jaw", a short story by Edgar Rice Burroughs, features an unfrozen caveman with politically uncorrect views.
  • Another Burroughs' example is The Eternal Lover (a.k.a. The Eternal Savage and Sweetheart Primeval). A cliff-dwelling warrior of 100,000 years ago, Nu, is magically transported to the present, falls in love with Victoria Custer of Beatrice, Nebraska, the reincarnation of his lost lover Nat-ul, and the two are transported back to the Stone Age.
• One of the spin-off Doctor Who novels involves a time-misplaced Neanderthal. The Doctor and Rose abandon Jack Harkness with him in Essex to teach him how to live in the present while they go to have adventures in his time. He ends up marrying a girl who's considered ugly by human standards and living happily ever after.
• Though set on a future alien planet rather than contemporary Earth, Riverworld uses elements of this trope when a group of people from various time periods all awaken together. A single caveman is among them, and his behavior and interactions with the later-era humans is in accordance with this trope.
• In John Darnton's Neanderthal, there are two Asian Neanderthal tribes—a cannibalistic one and a peaceful one.
• Mark Canter's Ember For The Sun: A pregnant Neanderthal woman is unfrozen. Instead of thawing her, the scientist frees the embryo and implants it into a modern woman. In an interesting use of the trope, the surrogate mother then gives birth to Ember Ozette, a born and raised modern-day Neanderthal.
• R.A. Lafferty had the recurring character of Austro, a genius Australopithecus.
• Joseph, one of the immortal protagonists of The Company Novels started life as a caveman (in fact, his father was responsible for some of the famous cave paintings). Also, the Company has some immortal neanderthals on staff who can't do public work because of their appearances.
• "The Gnarly Man" by L Sprague De Camp is about a Neanderthal named Shining Hawk whose aging process was frozen when he was struck by lightning early in his life. He has survived by his wits on the periphery of human society since the extinction of his own kind, using a succession of false identities and getting by as a blacksmith or in menial professions like his present one; appearing as as an 'ape man' in a travelling freak show. He has been a witness to much of history from the margins, making little personal impact on it.

Live Action Television

• Curtis, a Cro-Magnon, from Phil of the Future. He is found in the Diffys' time machine and ends up living with them. Eventually, he learns how to speak better English.
• Cirroc, The Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, a recurring character on Saturday Night Live. He was discovered and thawed in 1988 after being frozen in a glacial crevasse.
  • He seems to be a partial subversion of this, as he fits into society and speaks quite well, and uses his caveman background as a Simple Country Lawyer act.
• The second half of the first (and only) season of the 1960s Fantastic Comedy Its About Time had the astronauts and cavemen return to the 1960s, with the cavemen having to adapt to modern life.
  • Conversely, The Flintstones would have us believe that cavepeople (and their pet dinosaurs) already had access to all of the 1960s amenities, including cars, automatic dishwashers and a colour telly with a rooftop aerial.
• The eponymous Stig Of The Dump is found in a dump. It's implied (but never stated) that there's some sort of Time Portal between Barney's time period and Stig's (at one point Barney travels back to the paleolithic and helps Stig's tribe build a megalith).
• In an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch her Aunt Zelda found a two million year old fossil, brought it back to life, and evolved so he can speak. Which is okay with Sabrina. She can't remember what it feels like to be astonished.

Newspaper Comics

• The eponymous caveman Alley Oop eventually has an arc in which he visits different time periods with a time machine. He gets to go to the moon and drive an electric racecar.
• Ruben Bolling's comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug has a recurring character australopithecine in modern times - he assimilates well into society but occasionally lapses into feral behavior.

Video Games

• The protagonist of Hatoful Boyfriend is a hunter-gatherer who lives in a cave, yet otherwise goes through all the typical romantic high-school situations. She even has a cell phone!

Western Animation

• In an episode of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, "Scooby's Night with a Frozen Fright," a caveman was thawed from a block of ice and went around causing mayhem.
  • In one of the Scooby-Doo Mysteries novels, Scooby-Doo and the Caveman, another caveman is discovered. This one steals a professional figure skater's trademark silver skate.
• In an episode of The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, Billy finds and unfreezes Fred Flintstone.
• Cro subverts the trope with an unfrozen mammoth.
• Gnarrk from Teen Titans.
• Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels is an original take on this, featuring the titular frozen caveman thawing out in an era of less primitive cavemen as well as modern society.
  • No indication Cavey was thawed out in the Flintstones' time originally—the Flintstones appearances implied he originally coexisted alongside them (despite his cruder appearance) and then was trapped in ice at some point.
• Cave Guy on Freakazoid!. Subverted in that he's a giant, loincloth-wearing, club-dragging caveman who speaks in a haughty accent, subscribes to the New Yorker and owns a diversified stock portfolio.
• An episode of The Tick (animation) shows time-travellers from the future building a resort in the prehistoric past, exploiting the australopithecines as help - one of whom gets transported to Arthur's apartment, causing the Tick to shout "Arthur! MONKEY OUT OF NOWHERE!!!"
• Parodied in Sout Park, where they thaw out a man who had been frozen since 1996 and treat him as they would a prehistoric caveman.
• Bubba Duck from DuckTales (1987), a boy Neanderthal duck brought to the present day in a time machine.
• Krull the Eternal in Batman the Brave And The Bold, who combines elements of Vandal Savage and Shazam's King Kull.
• The Cryogenic Support Group in Futurama includes a caveman.
• The Slag Brothers from Wacky Races.
• Java from Martin Mystery
• An episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force featured "Oog", a caveman who somehow ended up in modern times. In spite of getting a massive boost in intelligence in the bargain ("Now me stopping to go behind bush to relieve myself, instead of just going while I walk!"), he was still a character on Aqua Teen, and it showed; when he was feeling the slightest bit unstimulated, he'd scream "OOG BORED!" and try to rip his own head off.

Real Life

• It's not exactly 'contemporary', but there is a theory that the legends of ogres, trolls and such stem from encounters with small groups of Neanderthals or other early human sub-species who survived into historic times.
• There are folktales of surviving cavemen in the Caspian region. Not a lot of evidence for it, though.