No children
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Jal8919536 — 17 years ago(May 02, 2008 10:34 PM)
Maybe that was one of the reasons the Ivaka leader had Naoh mate with his daughters.
At the beginning of the film, the Ulam leader is being groomed by his daughter, Ika is held captive with a young boy by the cannibalistic Kzamm, and there are a couple of children seen in the Ivaka village, plus Ika becomes pregnant with Naoh's child, suggesting Ika and Naoh were the Adam & Eve of our race. -
richardyar1 — 17 years ago(May 12, 2008 09:15 PM)
The skull Naoh digs up from the cannibals' fire seemed too small for an adult. Maybe the children were easier to catch and eat, similar to lions and herd animals. That hunting technique could explain the dirth of children. I believe there was an adolescant in the end scene before the fire is extinguished in the lake.
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pequaboy — 17 years ago(June 26, 2008 11:38 AM)
I just finished watching this and I have to toss in my 2 cents. If I'm not mistaken, I think I read a long time ago that Rae Dawn Chong's character, Ika was suppose to be about 13 - 15 years old. I think the reason she was selected for the role was because of her frail and petite physical stature was one of about a girl in that age bracket.
"A naked American man stole my balloons".
An American Werewolf In London -
FlyByNight32 — 17 years ago(September 09, 2008 05:49 PM)
Actually, the H. sapiens tribe had plenty of kids, the Cro-Magnon tribe had few, the only one I recall being the one that tried nailing one of the women at the stream, and the Neandertals & H. erectus tribe had none visible.
Maybe it was that you couldn't have kids working in the harsher conditions of the non-sapiens tribes, or maybe a subtle point that the other, less-evolved hominids were on the decline.
No, no - Pillage first,
then
burn! Stupid Vikings -
housefull — 16 years ago(August 01, 2009 04:31 AM)
I just saw this film 3 decades after reading about it, and seeing Rae Dawn in Playboy! It's hard to guess the ages of the characters beneath all those furs and hair and body paint. But I believe there were some young ones in the girl's tribe, and also in the final sequence. But there were no small children, and that's probably due to the practical difficulty of using very young actors in those harsh locations.
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wmousie — 11 years ago(October 30, 2014 07:06 PM)
I saw only one child in the Ulam Tribe, before the attack. He/she was picking fleas out of an old mans white hair. After the attack, I saw none. That might have been because they were being portrayed (in the beginning) as a tribe with little future. They werent the biggest or the strongest like the Kzamma, they didnt have the most organized methods of fighting (nor probably hunting, either) like the Wagabou, and they had not learned to make or use advanced weapons like the Ivaka. They only knew how to steal fire from natural sources or other tribes.
I am certain that the dangers of the Ulam Tribe's shooting location had little impact on why there were so few children. The caves where we see the Ulam Tribe, first and last, was shot at Greigs Caves, at the edge of the Niagara Escarpment, and the swamp the tribe retreated to after they lost their fire was about thirty miles north near Miller Lake. Both of these locations are in the Bruce Peninsula, the heart of Southern Ontario cottage county. This is no hostile territory which children would find dangerous.
I spent most of my childhood vacations in tents and cottages around the lakes of the Bruce Peninsula and never suffered anything more dangerous than a nasty sunburn when I swam and played most of one long day in the blazing sun on Sauble Beach. -
Justeatbeans — 16 years ago(November 16, 2009 07:34 PM)
there were not many women or children thru periods of history.
many women died in childbirth along with their offspring.
also one can surmise, albiet arbitrarily, that many children also died young.
One needs only to look at the harsh evironments and lack of medicines to spell such disasters for growth of tribes.
WAKE UP AND SMELL THE FREAKIN LEOTARDS -
Royalcourtier — 12 years ago(February 07, 2014 06:36 PM)
The argument about high mortality for children does not work. In a stone age tribe I would expect to see many children.
The higher the death rate the more children there will be. Look at any poor community, tribal community, or animal species for that matter. -
KlutzyGirl — 10 years ago(September 03, 2015 04:16 AM)
The larger population of children is true for agrarian societies, but unlikely for prehistoric times. Before modern medicine, there was a high death rate for children under 5 years old, up to 50% in hunter-gatherer groups. https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/936/WP90-07_Childhood_Mortality.pdf?sequence=1 As far as animals go, those rates are so that enough will reach breeding stage to keep the numbers fairly stable.
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crashdummy35 — 10 years ago(September 05, 2015 08:10 PM)
Great film with one flaw: none of the tribes has any children or adolescents.
I just saw this film for the first time in about 30 yearsno joke.
It held up
remarkably
well.
One theory I have about the kids:
Inbreeding led to no children or rare instances of successful birth. When the elder has him sleep with all the "healthy" womenI think they were implying introduction of new blood to get things back on trackmaybe they were having the same issues.
Regardless, I enjoyed it a crap ton more than I thought I was gong to.