Did cave people ever laugh?

I don’t think it’s limited to anything. If a cave man hears me laugh he’d run in the other direction, scared.

Babies can laugh, and they’re kind of early human beings… :-)

The males always cracked up whenever another male took a shot to the groin. It’s genetic.

@Adirondackwannabe Ball shots are timeless.

@silverfly Just not to the reciepient.

My husband had a man cave for a while. He laughed in it too.

Chimps laugh. It is certainly not limited to elaborate language. Babies are another good example, like @harple mentioned.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9wM8cY3yFM

Yes they did, often when they were alone. The resulting echo made them feel less lonesome.

Probably more since all the jokes were new then. Although the writers probably had day jobs.

Almost certainly. Aboriginal people laugh . They are the closest thing we have today to cave men. And, as @gailcalled said all the jokes were new then.

Depends mostly on what they find funny. So if a caveman hits another with a bat was funny for another he might laugh or at least smile.

Of course they did. Bog went to hit something with his club and missed and hit Bung instead and everyone laughed hysterically.

Three cavemen finally get the wooly mammath to its knees after a long arduous battle. The caveman who was approaching the mammath from the rear quickly slips and his head gets jammed into the mammoth’s wooly butt.

Methinks the others laughed.

COUNTERPOINT: Gauging by this SNL skit, it would seem that no, they did not.

Probably more than modern man. At least they didn’t have government to piss them off.

How would we ever know? I was not there and neither were you.

Hitting his woman over the head with a club may have given him joy, but who knows?

The cave people invented laughter.

It’s generally accepted that even dogs laugh. A dog laugh is like an excited, particularly noisy pant. It’s only used in play situations, basically when the dog is having a blast. Other dogs respond to the sound by relaxing. It seems to signal that there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.

I’m just offering this as confirmation that there isn’t a huge language or intelligence threshold requirement for laughter.

Gary Larson got very rich by assuming they did. Larson will no longer allow his images to be accessed on the net, however.

One example that slipped through

I did a study about this once. I used a prototype of the Orange Tree to send me back to the time of the caveman. I was very disappointed when I got there.

It seems someone had been there before me and had recruited all the cave men for Geico commercials!

They probably knew whether the chicken or the egg came first and why it crossed the road.

When that guy first tried to ride the wheel, I bet the whole tribe was Rolling on The Cave Floor Laughing Their Ass Off (ROTCFLTAO).

@majorrich omg LOL aboriginal people aren’t like cavemen!

It was through trying to tell jokes that language was invented.

@thesparrow I was thinking from the point of view of being unpolluted by modern influences. They are the closest approximate I could think of. Aside from the Belgians. LOL

They absolutely laughed . . . but maybe not for the reasons you may think. A long read, but interesting enough to be captivating:

http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Provine_96.html

Of course! Someone had to eventually laugh at the drawings they made!

What we don’t know is those paintings were the first evidence of the game ‘Pictionary’.

I wonder things like this about early man a lot!