Trivia / Quest for Fire

• Accidentally-Correct Writing:
  • As pointed out in the afterward for the 2020 English translation of the novel, Rosny portrayed a paleolithic world inhabited by multiple human species at the same time decades before this was found to be correct. There is even a species of dwarf humans that resemble Homo floresiensis or Homo luzonensis.
  • The blue-haired men were Misplaced Wildlife at the time the novel was published, being a clear reference to the recently discovered mountain gorilla. Since then, the large gorilla-like ape Gigantopithecus blacki was unearthed in Asia and has become a staple of prehistoric media. The latter end of its temporal range even overlaps with the time period of the story!
• Method Acting: Rae Dawn Chong stayed fully naked between takes in order to stay in character, even in freezing cold weather.
• Portrayed by Different Species: Since some of the wildlife featured in the film is prehistoric and thus extinct, some of their distant modern-day relatives were used to portray them, such as saber-toothed cats (which are played by trained lionesses with prosthetic saber-teeth) as well as mammoths (elephants covered in fur).
• Science Marches On:
  • It was done with the knowledge of its time. Many aspects displayed by the film are wrong, but nobody knew back then. Most notably, it is now known that free-standing shelters, humor, and the missionary position were common to hominids long before Homo sapiens.
  • The cave lion's "colossal" size in the book appears to be based on the then better-known American lion. Cave lions were a recently discovered species at the time known from fragmentary remains.
  • The Kzamms in the novel do not closely resemble any human species known at the time or today. Their ape-like long arms and short legs bring to mind Homo habilis or even Australopithecus, neither of which were known at the time and both were too small to be candidates anyway. Other animalistic traits like glowing eyes and wolf-like ears are pure fantasy. Their savage cannibalistic ways bring to mind contemporary portrayals of neanderthals (as opposed to the more sympathetically portrayed Oulhamr) but their tall stature rules them out too. Most likely, they are supposed to represent the "ape man", then represented by the now defunct species Pithecanthropus erectus or "Java man". Known from fragmentary remains, Java man was thought to be essentially a bipedal ape until more remains of the same species revealed a physiology closer to modern humans, resulting in reclassification as the familiar taxon Homo erectus.
  • The deer Megaloceros is called by the obsolete name Megaceros.
• Word of Dante: The afterword for the 2020 English edition has a fun section identifying the various hordes with real hominid species known from the fossil record.

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