The Caveman in Us: Taking the Instinct Joke Seriously

The snack drawer and the fireplace video

Come home from the shops and, for some reason, the snack drawer gets restocked first. You are not going to eat any of it tonight, yet an empty drawer feels unsettling and a full one feels like relief. The internet has a ready explanation: your body still thinks it lives in a time when food was scarce. The same joke gets stretched to cover the way hunger sharpens your tone in minutes, and the lurch in your stomach when you spot a plan in the group chat that everyone was invited to except you.

Fire gets a mention too. Stare into a campfire long enough and time simply goes missing, and some people miss that feeling enough to leave a video of burning logs playing at home. Korean even has a slang word for it, bulmeong, roughly “fire-zoning out”, which tells you how common the experience is. In moments like that, “it's the caveman in you” sounds oddly convincing.

I think the joke is loved for simple reasons. It hands you a plausible reason for behaviour you cannot quite explain, and it takes a little of the blame off your shoulders. It was not you who ate at midnight; it was a hunger tens of thousands of years old. And because it applies to everyone, everyone gets to laugh without anyone getting hurt. My Caveman DNA started from that friendly joke.

When a joke puts on a lab coat

As the person making the thing, though, I want to flag something first. A lot of “caveman instinct” talk borrows ideas from evolutionary psychology, a real field, but what circulates online is usually not that field's conclusions — it is a one-line summary. Whether your snack hoarding really comes from an environment where food was scarce, or from multipack deals, bulk sizes and the way your family did things when you were a kid, there is no way to tell from one person's behaviour.

How people lived in the deep past can only be inferred, carefully, from what they left behind, and matching today's habits one by one onto those inferences is a further leap. Plausible stories are easy to write; plausible and true are not the same thing. It is worth remembering that researchers themselves continue to argue over which explanations in this area hold up.

So this test says up front that it is not science. It does not look at your genes, and it has no idea who your ancestors were. The number on your result screen is just a handful of choices converted into a story. I believe being open about that is exactly what lets you enjoy it without reservation.

Asking about 2 a.m. instead of snacks

The funny part is that once I actually started writing questions, snacks and campfires almost disappeared. “Do you stockpile snacks?” has an obvious answer, and the answer tells you very little about a person. Instead I went with short scenes, asking what you do first once you are inside one.

The first question reads: “2 a.m. Something rustles outside your front door. Then silence again.” You can kill the lights and listen, open the door, decide it is the same old noise and go back to bed, or wake someone so you can listen together. Another question puts you beside a full moving truck with room for exactly one more thing — the laptop, the sleeping kid, the toolbox, or the neighbour who knows the area. Another has word going around about somewhere much better, where nobody has actually been.

Every scene is set in the present. No caves, no mammoths. What the questions carry over are the things the caveman joke was quietly pointing at all along: noticing danger, deciding what to drop, how you face a group of strangers, whether you can let a broken plan go. Eight scenes share out six dimensions — Instinct, Judgment, Senses, Adaptability, Body and Tribe — and where you stand in the tribe — Hunter, Gatherer or Firekeeper — isn't asked outright but read from the way those six scores tilt.

Why the impressive answer costs you

With a test like this, everyone is tempted to pick the answer a “real caveman” would pick: turn and shout at the footsteps following you down a dark street, or spend the team's last budget now and go earn more. The test keeps a quiet tally of those choices. We call it Recklessness, and picking the impressive-looking answer again and again nudges your number down rather than up.

There is a trap on the other side as well. Always choose the most careful option and a value called Rigidity climbs — the kind of answer where weeks of planning collapse and you still wait it out with the same plan. The thinking behind the design is that survival is not about being brave or being cautious, but about knowing when to switch between the two.

The Body dimension is deliberately given less weight for the same reason. “Caveman” makes people think of muscle first, but this test argues that raw fitness matters less than you would assume. If any one of the six dimensions bottoms out, the whole score is dragged down no matter how good the rest are, and two strengths only lift each other when both are high. To see a threat and not freeze, you need both Senses and Instinct: that is story logic, translated into arithmetic.

From 1% to 99%, and twenty-four names

Your result is a caveman DNA figure between 1% and 99%, placed in one of eight tiers. At the top is The Pure Caveman, followed by The Waking Wild, The Hardened Hunter, The Useful One, Half and Half, The Tamed and The Faded Instinct, with The Fully Modern at the bottom. Layer on the Hunter, Gatherer or Firekeeper read from the shape of your scores, and you get twenty-four results.

The thing I cared about most was balancing the two ends. If you work through every possible combination of answers, The Pure Caveman and The Fully Modern each come out at just under 3%, almost exactly the same share. I did not want to suggest that being closer to the caveman makes you better. The Fully Modern result includes lines like “Stuck on anything, you open a search bar within a second” and “Stairs right there, and you still take the elevator” — not insults, just a way of living that fits a world with roofs and map apps.

At the other end, the Firekeeper version of The Pure Caveman includes “Alarm off, and you still wake with the sun.” Whichever end you land on, I hoped at least one or two of those lines would make a friend say, “That is so you.” In the end, what this test is trying to do is not pass a verdict but start a conversation.

Why it stays a joke

The best thing about the caveman joke is that it makes us a little more forgiving. Waking at a small noise in the night, caring where you stand in the group photo, getting curt when you are hungry — it lets you see these as old habits rather than flaws. That generosity is useful whether or not the explanation behind it is true.

The moment the joke turns into an excuse — “it's instinct, I can't help it” — or into a yardstick for judging someone else, the fun is gone. That is why My Caveman DNA hands you a number and a tier while holding firmly to its place as a game. Score 99% and you do not need to move back into a cave; score 1% and you have not lost anything. Whether you restock the snack drawer tonight is entirely up to you.