Video Asylum

Posted by Duilawyer (A) on July 17, 2008 at 07:47:08

In Reply to: RE: Watched 10,000 BC last night on Blu-very impressive posted by Duilawyer on July 17, 2008 at 07:41:27

10,000 B.C. Click image to expand.10,000 B.C.

The Warner Bros. cave man saga 10,000 B.C. raked in more than $35 million on its first weekend. The film tells an action-packed love story set against a prehistoric backdrop that includes everything from woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers to pyramids and written language. Did all of these things exist at the same time?

No. The woolly mammoth and the saber-toothed tiger might have survived as late as 10,000 B.C., although they went extinct fairly abruptly right around that time, give or take a millennium. On the geologic timescale, this date marks the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, which we know colloquially as the Ice Age, a period of nearly 2 million years that saw the rapid expansion of Homo sapiens across the planet. Some paleontologists blame excessive hunting by humans for the extinction of these species, though the number of mammoth fossils that show evidence of having been killed by man-made weapons—usually stone spears—is fairly small. Others suggest that disease or climate changes wiped them out. Whatever the cause, the mammoth-hunting hero of 10,000 B.C. is practicing a dying art. Other predators in the film, such as the giant, flightless, carnivorous birds, were already extinct by this time, though they were once thought to have survived up to around the end of the Pleistocene, most numerously in the Americas.