Editorial Reviews

As produced by (and aired on) A&E's History Channel, the speculative documentary Clash of the Cavemen travels back in time tens of thousands of years to the Earth's premier Ice Age. The program theorizes that at this point in early history, two early sub-species of homo sapiens walked the Earth: the brawny and sinewy Neanderthals, who exhibited tremendous physical strength, prowess and a resistance to pain but limited mental power, and the Cro-Magnons, who, conversely, exhibited astonishing intelligence but suffered from weak and disease-prone physical constitutions. To put it more bluntly, the repeated confrontations between these two species pitted brain against brawn in a contest for survival of the fittest. As time wore on, each sub-species found its very existence threatened by such external forces as extreme temperatures, a decline in available food, and animal predators. Clash of the Cavemen revisits this era and relays the tale of the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals, abetted by data from the genome-mapping project at the Max Planck Institute in Germany and by dramatic onscreen recreations. ~ Nathan Southern, Rovi All Movie Guide