When did cave men live?

Answer 1

Well, "cave man" is kind of a misleading term. Very few of our cousins and ancestors actually spent much time in caves. For one thing, there just aren't enough caves placed where you can use them. We get the idea from a handful of cave sites which, by managing to remain undisturbed for millennia, still contain artifacts of primitive man, famously wall paintings.

The current thinking on human prehistory runs something like this:

1. Between 8 and 6 million years ago, our line separated from that of the apes. They went on evolving and so did we, but in different directions (This answers the Creationist's question, "If Men came from Apes, why are there still Apes?")

2. Around 3 million years ago, a creature we've dubbed Homo habilis ("handy man") passed through a sort of body-building phase to become Homo ergaster ("working man") and then Homo erectus ("upright man"). This last is a bit of a misnomer, since H. habilis had - we later learned - mastered the erect posture, but the name, once given, stuck.

3. Homo erectus left Africa (did I mention this was all going on there?) and populated the rim of the Indian ocean.

4. Folks back in Africa kept on evolving and produced Homo heidelburgensis ("man from Heidelburg," 'cause that's where we found the first skull). H. heidelburgensis gave rise to Homo sapiens neanderthalensis (the "smart man from Newman's valley, better known as Neanderthal Man.)

5. H. sapiens neanderthalensis left for Europe around 750,000 years ago, while back in Africa, another child of H. heidelburgensis was developing into Homo sapiens sapiens(double smart man," also known as us).

6. Some 50,000 years ago, give or take a few centuries, we had tweaked the design enough to be called AMH, or Anatomically Modern Humans.

7. We (that is, our AMH ancestors) enterred Europe about 35,000 years ago and shortly thereafter (ca. 28,000 years ago) the Neanderthals disappeared, leaving us as the sole human species. [Actually, there was another one over in Indonesia, Homo floresiensis ("man from Flores," aka The Hobbit), but we didn't know about him until this century.]

8. Some of those AMH provided the evidence for "cave man" [which would be Homo speleus if that were a real classification].

Answer 2

Cave men, or prehistoric humans, lived approximately 2.5 million years ago to around 10,000 years ago.