Once there were television advertisements with cavemen in them, and decades before that there was the cartoon character cavemen with their own television show, the Flintstones.

What’s all this fascination with cavemen again? Maybe because inside of most men there is a little caveman. I’m careful to say inside “most” men, and perhaps I should reduce that to just “some,” but I think it’s more than just “some.”

For many men, myself included, a hole in the wall — or mountain — with enough space behind it to store stuff and have a workshop would be would be the perfect living arrangement. Who needs all this extra space anyway?

Once there was a show on television about a private detective that had him living in a garage with his car. That was all the room he needed. I don’t now remember the name of the show, but I was fascinated by the living arrangement.

Since that time, I have figured out the best living quarters for many men would be an apartment over a garage with storage space and a workshop. What more does a man need.

Oh, yeah. Most of us need a wife, or want one, anyway. There are some exceptions to the rule, of course, but when you get down to it, really not many. That’s just the way we were designed.

With a wife, of course, comes this need for something other than a simple cave. Now we have to have space for children and pretty things such as furniture, china, silverware, crystal, all kinds of junk that mean nothing to a man.

After all, what man needs more than a few guns and bows to hunt with and some fishing gear, and a few books in my case. Any furniture other than a bed — softer to sleep on — a chair or two — softer and easier to sit on — a bookcase, a stove and an ice box and a big freezer for all that game you think you are going to kill and all the fish you think you are going to catch.

The garage, of course, is for the vehicle that has replaced the horse and other animal modes of transportation, and for a boat or two.

When Genie reads this, I’m going to get a withering look. She’s used to me by now, though. When I first came down here, she and the kids were still in Jackson because the school year had started, the kids were in school and she was teaching.

I had a nearly perfect cave for about a year. Then in the spring, she came down, found a house, and when school was out, that’s what we moved into. For nearly a year, I had explored the woods and waters to my heart’s content.

I wonder what the television show with actors made up like cavemen is going to be like. It won’t be about caves, if what I have seen from the ads is accurate. These folks will live in fancy places and dress up in suits and so forth with real jobs. Poor guys. I wonder if they will miss their ancestral caves?

Fred and Barney and Wilma and Betty also were taken out of their place and put in a form of caveman suburbs and had real jobs and so forth. They were actually portrayed as being happy living like us modern folks.

I still wonder what is wrong with just being a caveman? Somebody ought to be able to have fun and go hunting and fishing all the time.

Actually, though, I suspect it wasn’t so much fun being a caveman in those prehistoric times. Imagine having to test all that food to see what is good to eat and what will kill you.

Think of the first person who tried an oyster, or maybe the first one to try a hot pepper. I wonder how over time they realized these things were edible, especially the pepper. Even as much as I love hot peppers, I suspect that if I had been the first person to bite into one I may not have wanted to try it again.

Cavemen figured that all out, including how to use peppers and other plants as spices to enliven their food.

I believe many people think of them as not being so very bright, but I believe they had to have been at least as bright as we are, for they started the technological revolution that keeps on building on itself as we travel through time. There were some songs back in the 1960s, especially one that rings in my ears, “In the Year 2525” that was released in 1969 shortly before man landed on the moon, that sort of charts the future of technology.

Of course “the bottom of the long glass tube” for babies came early, as in 1978 rather than 6565.

That has nothing to do with cavemen, of course, other than that we are continuing the journey. I just hope the show is as funny as the TV ads sometimes are.