Dinosaurs, cavemen, and volcanic disaster: America's prehistoric genesis myth

The root problem in American ethnogenesis is that we just got here, and where we came from was host to rival empires with their own already elaborated cultures. The solution has been to push into the background the period of time when those empires grew. So, ignore the Early Modern and most of the Medieval periods, and a good amount of the Ancient world as well.

As I've detailed earlier, American culture does allow some exceptions -- provided they avoid our European lineage. Mainly, this means drawing on our imagined connections to the Saharo-Arabian sphere rather than the Indo-European one. Ancient Egypt and Israel / Judah are more fundamental to American identity than Ancient Rome or Greece, and not because we're all Christian fundamentalists -- none of the Egyptian part of our culture is from Greco-Roman times or later, it's from the times of the pyramids, mummies, death masks, scarab beetles, hieroglyphics, etc.

But even Ancient Egypt falls within the historical record -- where did we come from before then? What is our prehistoric genesis myth?

Not in the Garden of Eden, not Adam and Eve, or anything else that is distinctly Old World-oriented, let alone from an existing Old World genesis myth (from the Old Testament). That would contradict our New World identity. Sure, maybe we ultimately came from the Old World, but our origins back there must somehow feel as though they were also right here. More lush and tropical, more beachy. And so far back in time that it trumps the Old World vs. New World population split -- perhaps so far back that the continents were all one big Pangaean landmass anyway, where the Old vs. New World distinction doesn't even exist.

But in any case, a stylized imaginary location much like the Garden of Eden, which does not come with a latitude & longitude measurement to pinpoint it for the audience. Shrouded in the mysteries of prehistory, but clear enough to be seen in its outlines.

In the American genesis myth, the land is lush and tropical, along with rocky mountainous areas, ringed by beaches, with no seafaring technology to take anyone far off into the ocean. Crucially, there is a volcano somewhere, whether it is prominent in the landscape or its downstream effects are (like cooled & hardened lava making up the rocky terrain).

Our primitive caveman ancestors do not inhabit this island alone -- an endless variety of dinosaurs tower over us, mainly as apex predators who prey on the cavemen (and lesser dinosaur species). Our caveman ancestors didn't have very advanced technology, for defense or offense, so they / we were always underdogs, unlikely Davids against the terrifying Goliaths.

In fact, there were other human-like primates there as well -- depending on the telling, some far more primitive and ape-like than our caveman ancestors, some a bit more advanced. But not human, in either case -- a rival hominid species.

As though there were not enough drama from the negotiations and battles among caveman tribes, and cavemen woo-ing cavewomen, and the struggle for survival against the dinosaurs -- when a climactic, apocalyptic event is called for, it is not water-related like the flood of the Old Testament, and there is no water-related vessel like an ark to navigate it.

Rather, it is fire-based -- a massive volcanic eruption, with lava flowing freely, fireballs raining down from the sky, the earth splitting apart to open fiery pits below, and depending on how long the event is followed, ash and smoke clouding the sky, depriving the lush vegetation of sunlight, and wreaking havoc on the landscape long after the initial explosion. In this large-scale destruction, the lumbering dinosaurs are left with nowhere to hide and sadly go extinct, while the nimble and clever cavemen -- some fortunate subset of them, anyway, who lend a helping hand to each other -- eke out an existence in the aftermath, ultimately to populate the entire world with human beings. (Likewise the other cute and clever mammals, though little attention is given to their fate.)

* * *

There is no single author or work that provides the outline for this genesis myth, but legends rarely do trace back to a single author. Similar stories are told, they catch on, are reworked, and nobody remembers exactly where they came from, or who they came from.

But in the interest of scholarly documentation, this genesis myth comes -- when else? -- after the integrative civil war in American imperial expansion, when our ethnogenesis really gets started. The earliest example I can find is D.W. Griffith's short film "Primitive Man" (AKA Brute Force), from 1914, following up on his dinosaur-free short film "Man's Genesis" from 1912. In a comical vein, there was also the 1915 short, "The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy". Later animated shorts include "Felix the Cat Trifles with Time" from 1925, and "Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur" from 1939.

The myth would not be fleshed out in feature-length form until 1940, in the American movie One Million B.C., which was later remade in 1966 in American-occupied Britain, as One Million Years B.C., with Raquel Welch and Martine Beswick (now that'll get the ol' caveman nature a-goin'). The Brits, still under American influence after their own empire and culture bit the dust after WWI, followed up on their remake with a new example of their own, 1970's When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (starring recent Playboy Playmate of the Year, Victoria Vetri).

In between then, from 1960 to '66, the iconic TV series The Flintstones standardized the key element of dinosaurs and homo sapiens co-existing.

By the time of the 1983 Iron Maiden song "Quest for Fire", about primitive man, it had become obligatory to introduce the story with, "In a time when dinosaurs walked the earth..."

In later media, Japanese video games series of the 1990s like Bonk's Adventure and Joe & Mac depict cavemen and dinosaurs side-by-side, with dinosaurs as predators upon cavemen, and prominent volcanic landscapes (Bonk's transformation animation shows his head exploding like a volcano, too).

By now, this myth is so widespread and taken for granted that Wikipedia editors feel the need to "correct the record" -- to no avail -- by stating that it's an anachronism to depict hominids and dinosaurs living in the same time period. So clueless -- in American cultural works, it is *required* to show dinosaurs and cavemen side-by-side! They are fiction, legends, myths, not claiming to be pedantic documentaries or audio-visual textbooks. And so, the "dinos and grugs" image remains.

* * *

The stark differences between the American genesis myth and all others from our closest historical relatives (actual, not imagined) are obvious. That includes the Garden of Eden, the World Tree, or the Titans (dinosaurs only bearing a weak resemblance to them, due to their sheer size and ferocity, not in being proto-gods or super-humans).

But it also differs crucially from other European stories about dinosaurs and hominids found together, such as Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864-'7) or Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912).

For one thing, those stories never spawned an endless chain of development within Europe. Instead, they took root and multiplied in America, beginning with Edgar Rice Burroughs, author of Tarzan (*not* a dino-centric series), who developed them in his Pellucidar series and Caspak series of pulp novels during the 1910s. He also pioneered the other side of our primitive-futurist cultural identity, in his Barsoom series, also from the 1910s, about life and adventure on Mars (including dinosaur-esque prehistoric beasts).

The main difference, though, is that the Europeans were not writing genesis myths -- they were set in the contemporary world, albeit in some undiscovered part of it, where prehistoric creatures had managed to survive into the present day. Perhaps far under the Earth's crust, perhaps some remote island -- but still, today. The American works I mentioned in the last section are all set in the very distant past, as part of an origin story. Lost world vs. prehistoric genesis.

Why didn't Jules Verne or other Europeans hit on the genesis approach? Because they already had secure genesis myths, from the Garden of Eden, the Roman Empire, Medieval chivalry, Early Modern gunpowder, global exploration, etc. They had no need to set their origin story 1 million years ago.

But Americans, needing to obscure our European and even Indo-European lineage, had to set our genesis myth in the very distant past, when dinosaurs walked the earth, alongside our caveman ancestors, with that volcano always looming in the background.

It also played up our out-West cultural origins, following the meta-ethnic frontier between us and the Indians, and later the Mexicans in the Southwest. There are no volcanoes back East, but there are closer to the Pacific Ring of Fire, Yellowstone, etc. Crucially, there are no active volcanoes in Europe proper, only in some Mediterranean islands. There are hardly any inactive volcanoes in Europe, for that matter. Western America is also where the dinosaur bone beds are. Not to mention earlier stages of human culture and civilization, among the Indians. Whether or not a given Indian tribe is hunter-gatherers, it's a hell of a lot closer to "primitive man" than any group of people in former European empires.

* * *

The centrality of these elements in our conception of who we are and where we came from, is shown by what questions we start asking about the Christian genesis myth, which itself is borrowed from the Second Temple Judaic myth.

What does the Bible have to say about dinosaurs, huh? Or "the fossil record" -- which means "dinosaur bones," not fossils of intermediate stages in evolution. Adam sure doesn't seem like a caveman -- are you *sure* this is the first human being? And what's all this about a catastrophic flood -- everyone knows the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor impact and/or volcanic eruptions.

This is not a midwit attempt to defeat mythology with empirical facts, evidence, science, reason, etc. -- it is one myth vs. another myth. Skeptics and atheists foolishly thought that Americans not buying into the Garden of Eden or Great Flood myths meant that they were fellow reddit-brains, when it really meant Americans had developed their own genesis myth that was sharply at odds with the Old World one. That's why we ignore the Wikipedia nerds complaining about the aNaCHroNiStIC depiction of cavemen and dinosaurs in the Stone Age!

Mormonism, the distinct American religion, still relies on the Garden of Eden myth, although being a young religion, perhaps they have enough time to issue "clarifications" or addenda to work the "cavemen and dinosaurs and/or other hominids" into their canon. They are much more neutral about evolution and missing links and our relationship with primates, and do not have many Young Earth types. So they could probably work dinosaurs and cavemen into their mythology better than Christians could.

Instead of Lucifer tempting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he's influencing one tribe or another among the population of One Million Years B.C., to act in evil ways to benefit themselves while harming others, acting in defiance of God's will in order to get a leg up in the competition against other tribes... perhaps killing too many dinosaurs, without being able to eat their meat, use their bones for construction, and so on. Irresponsible relationship with animals, especially if God had told them the dinos were sacred and not to be messed around with unnecessarily.

And by this point, dinosaurs *are* sacred animals in American culture, not only from our genesis myth, but lost world stories from King Kong to Jurassic Park, not to mention other icons like Godzilla (imported from Japan, who understands us more than any other foreign nation does), Barney, Yoshi (another one from Japan), the all-American '90s family sit-com Dinosaurs, "rawr means 'I love you' in dinosaur," and even the Dino Gura costume for the most famous vtuber (rivaling her shark theme in popularity).

Not too long ago, kids' snacks were made to resemble zoo animals -- but by now, they have to be dino nuggets, dino chips, dino egg candies, and so on and so forth. All part of enculturating our future generations into respect for the dinosaurs.

More than the bald eagle -- our nominal national mascot -- it is the dinosaurs who are our spirit animals. No one else had claimed them, since they had only recently been understood, as of the late 19th century, especially during the American "bone wars" between rival paleontologists (a term that still refers to "dinosaur bones" in common speech). Just the right opportunity for a young nation that wants to mythologize its prehistoric origins!