Ever since man’s first shambling progenitors first emerged from the primordial mini-mall that spawned them, mankind has oft gazed up at the infinite blackness of the night sky and pondered the question that consumed the lives of some of the greatest thinkers who ever lived, driving some mad while others merely got bored and went on to invent things like the hamdinger and the walk-in juicer.  Indeed, it is a rare man who hasn’t had the occasional sleepless night from musing upon that ageless question which defines human existence itself: “Who would win, astronauts or cavemen?”

            Perhaps you think believe that only a fool would endeavor to answer a quandary of such giganimousity.  Perhaps I am that fool.  After all, both sides have their champions in the modern debate, and both make compelling cases in their side’s favor.  So before we go with bold entreaty wither no man has gone before, let’s take a look at the strengths, weaknesses, and aromas that cavemen and astronauts bring to the table.

            Going in chronological order, we start with cavemen.  First off, cavemen have the advantage of not being freaked out by astronauts.  Your average caveman who’s never been frozen and unthawed in the future, or transported by space aliens to the modern day has never seen an astronaut before, so he won’t be stopping to think “Oh crap, that’s a friggin’ astronaut!  He’s gonna drop a Hubble on me or something!  I better find a cave, now!”  Also, since cavemen are generally not famous for their masterful command of the subtleties of the English language, they probably wouldn’t even be able to panic so eloquently.  An actual caveman panicking would sound more like this, “Crap, ooga zonga noop noop grunt snarf!”  Clearly, it loses a little something in translation.  Next, cavemen are good at hitting things with other things, and tend not to focus on meaningless technical distinctions.  No caveman ever said, “Damn, this is a Mark III brontosaurus femur, I did all my training on the Mark II!”  Also, cavemen are not above throwing their own poop should the occasion demand it.  Fashion-wise, cavemen still have the advantage, wearing saber tooth tiger hide togas, and the occasional tasteful business-casual necktie, while astronauts wear those clunky moon suits.  Finally, cavemen have Caveman McGuyver Powers^®, which means that they can build just about anything out of a couple of trees and a dinosaur, though more often than not, it’s just a dishwasher or a roto-tiller or something.

            Astronauts meanwhile have a number of advantages of their own.  For one thing, they can sing, which would surprise the cavemen and make them wonder at the beauty of their trippy space music, while some other astronauts snuck around behind and clubbed the cavemen over the head like so many saber-toothed baby tyrannoseals.  Next, astronauts might have phat kung fu skills.  They might not too, but the cavemen don’t know that, so all the astronauts have to do is wave their arms around menacingly and say “Whaaaaaa!” and the cavemen will probably fall for it.  Astronauts also usually have sucky space guns (at least in all the movies I’ve ever seen).  I don’t know why they don’t just use regular guns since they work just fine in space, but every time you see an astronaut in a movie, he’s got some kind of lame compressed air stun whiffle gun that’s completely ineffective against anything other than space wusses (of which there are comparatively few).  To their advantage though, astronauts are well inured to the effects of things that make you barf, so all hey have to do is each pick up a caveman and give him an airplane ride until he throws up, a propensity towards nausea being the one notable caveman weakness, as everybody knows.

            Now, it seems to me that it would be altogether too difficult to reason out the conclusion of such an epic battle were it to be fought out by all the cavemen and astronauts that one could find, and if you just made them form teams and play football or something, that’d just be silly, cuz the cavemen would think you meant soccer, and wackiness would ensue.  No, the only solution is to choose from each side a champion; the greatest caveman and the greatest astronaut who have ever lived.  This is why I choose Captain Caveman, from the eponymous Captain Caveman Show and Major Healy, from I Dream of Jeannie.

            The battle is not nearly so one-sided as you might at first believe, for even though Major Healy has Barbara Eden using her magical powers to help him, its important to remember that more often than not things go horribly awry when she intervenes and likely as not, she’ll end up sending her hero to a swift and gory death with her bumbling.  At the same time, she is totally hot.  Captain Caveman, not to be outdone, also had a couple of girls who followed him around, and since I can’t remember anything about them, we’ll just say that their names were Slorg the Soulrender and Peggy, and that they ddin’t really have any magical powers.  Without Jeannie helping him though, Major Healy is just a worthless honky with a helmet on, while Captain Caveman has his go, go, gadget club of awesomeness with him at all times.  To make a long story short, Captain Caveman would pretty much completely kill Major Healy in about 3 minutes, and then go and make out with Jeannie.

            So, in conclusion, we have learned, um, uh, that animated cavemen are better than sitcom astronauts.  So if you’re ever at some kind of weird cartoon troglodyte vs. sitcom space cracker guy illegal bloodsport cagematch thing, invite me along, because I’ve always wanted to see one of those; but also put all your money on the caveman.