..a couple of rough years/seasons = no living small ones? Maybe?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

I just saw it today and yes there were children present.

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

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

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.

fpb & solongthanks: What movie did you watch? There were children in this movie. Pay attention!
"To live in the hearts of those we leave behind, we never die."

This message has been deleted.

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.

Maybe this is the reason why there are no longer any cavemen!

the girls tribe had children and adolescents. They can be seen when they bring
naoh into the camp and laugh at him.

I just purchased the movie and watched it for the first time in over 25 years and I still loved it (unlike my revisiting of "Easy Rider"). To the point though, the last tribe we met definitely had children. We saw them in the crowd when our hero was first dragged into the village. Most of the groups we saw were pretty small bands, and it stands to reason that the infant mortality was pretty high back then, so perhaps that is the reason that the only child we saw was in an established village (rather than wandering hunter/gather groups). Maybe having childern in the scenes just weren't high on the producers list. Still as you said, what a great movie. I felt like I was actually looking back into time. My only problem was that I thought the raiding apeman tribe was a little too human in their attack strategy and their use of fire (since they stole several burning branches), and the lower primate type behavior of the Neanderthals - but I'm not an anthropology scholar so maybe it was an accrate portral of Neanderthals or as good a guess as any as to how (or if) different human sub-species interacted and behaviors merged.

Is it possible that Child Protective Services would not let kids work in the harsh conditions of the film shoot?
Terry

I did think the same thing just as i watched it about 10 minutes ago.
But I did see one child (about 5-7 years old) in the prehistoric original tribe. And i'm sure i saw a few pre-teens in the asiatic tribe.
hmm i could be wrong about the asiatic part tho

great point!
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
Philip K. Dick