Movie makes Paleontologists and Anthropologists cringe
ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. rates an A for sheer entertainment, but rates an F for sheer terrorizing of paleontologists and anthropologist for heinous crimes against prehistoric accuracy.
1) Cro-Magnon people co-existing with dinosaurs? Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago thanks to the Baptistina meteorite, all six miles wide of it, slamming into the ocean just due west of Mexico.
2) Blonde-haired Cro-Magnon people? Blonde-hair is now thought to have originated just under 10,000 years ago. Blue-eyes appeared in people near the Black Sea only 8,000 years ago.
3) No prehistoric mammals are shown, which would be more accurate but not quite. Most prehistoric mammals died off in another great extinction around 12,900 years ago when a large comet or comet fragments exploded over North America, sending the world into a sudden ice age that the large prehistoric mammals couldn't adapt to fast enough.
4) Australeopithecus apemen are shown inhabiting caves like troglodytes. The Austr. apemen went extinct nearly a million years before Cro-Magnon man. The movie should have depicted Neanderthal men instead. Even the last ape-looking man, Homo Erectus, went extinct long before Cro-Magnon. Homo Erectus is now thought by scientists to be one of the three species of man that walked the planet. Homo erectus was first; overlapped a little with Neanderthal man and then went extinct. Homo E. was on earth for 400,000 years, pretty successful story. Next man species, Neanderthal man, walked earth for around 180,000 to 260,000 years. Not too shabby either, although Neanderthal man spend the whole time still living in caves and using primitive rock tools. Cro-Magnon man (us) appears circa 40-50 plus thousand years ago. We've been to the moon and back and our kids are twittering each other on tiny communication gizmos of wonderous technology. Also, every human on this planet today is descended from only 5,000 breeding human females from 70,000 years ago. That's due to the gigantic volcano, Toba, which dwarfed Krakatoa (1888) blowing up and sending the whole planet into a nuclear winter with acid rain planetwide and another ice age to boot. And today, we humans still can't stand one another on this world.