Fred Cameron, Jr., age 12, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, for his question:
Were there dinosaurs around when the cavemen lived?
No, the dinosaurs and the cavemen belong in different chapters of the earth's history. In fact, after the last of the dinosaurs departed there were several long chapters before the first human beings arrived on the scene. It's nice to pretend that our sturdy ancestors managed to cope with the giant lizards but they did not.
Scientists go to great pains to arrange the past history of life on earth in the correct order. Most of their evidence is based on fossil remains, left in crustal deposits that can be dated. In many cases, radioactive substances can be used to estimate how long ago the owners of fossils lived. All this evidence, and much more, indicates that the dinosaurs become extinct toward the end of the Mesozoic Era. The cavemen left no evidence until about 60 million years later.
Anthropologists have searched the world for fossil remains of the earliest human beings. Lately we have heard about some remarkable remains found in Africa. These scraps of old bone are said to be more than two million and perhaps three million years old. But let's not ;bet carried away by this amazing news. The owners of those old bones may or may not have been related to our earliest human ancestors.
In any case, the cavemen would not have recognized them as their kinfolk and certainly they bore little resemblance to modern man. Actually the cavemen never had a chance to meet either the dinosaurs or the owners of those ancient fossils, which may or may not have been related to human ancestors. The fact is, the human race as we know it did not appear until around the time of the cavemen, which was thousands, rather than millions of years ago.
Then we speak of cavemen, we mean human families who were clever enough to find more or less permanent shelters for themselves. They were not advanced enough to build houses or homes, though some used sticks to make lean to shelters against the sides of steep cliffs. For many thousands of years, these people of the Old Stone Age were content to live in natural caves and find shelter under natural . ledges.
They lived when the ice ape glaciers were beginning to retreat from the Northern Hemisphere. They sharpened stones to make scraping tools and used thongs of leather to make hammers from sticks and stones. Here and there, a few groups learned to control fire. These lucky old geniuses warmed themselves by their campfires and eventually discovered the pleasures of cooked food.
These paleolithic, or old Stone Age people, shared their world with a very strange assortment of animals. There were giant sloths and huge hungry wolves. When they returned home from the hunt, perhaps an enormous, bad tempered cave bear had moved into the premises. Life was full of hazards and hardships ¬but thank goodness those sturdy cave dwellers never had to cope with the thundering dinosaurs.