I recall this word being used a few times in my youth to describe people who looked kind of brutish or cavemanish. They were described as “throwbacks” as if this were an actual, real thing where the whimsy of nature had popped out an earlier, more primitive form of human being (or other animals).
Do real genetic "throwbacks"of any kind actually exist or is this just a metaphor being taken too seriously?
Well, there are the teeth of hens and the toes of horses.
Edit: link doesn’t seem to have the complete text of the essay. Pity. The collections of Gould’s books are well worth buying, and most of them are now available as ebooks. Plenty of photos of horses with atavistic toes are available, though.
So… a caveman being born to modern parents really would be hypothetically possible?
No–more like (hypothetically possibly) a kid with a heavy brow-ridge, or a very weak chin, or a significant occipital bun. An individual trait or two. With the horse example, the genes that prevent normal horses from having more than one toe malfunction somehow and allow extra toes to grow. But the horses never “sport” back to eohippus.
There are certain genetic variations in the human species, and it’s possible for a person to be born with lots of traits that seem cavemanish. So take a guy like Nikolai Valuev.
He’s got massive brow ridges, thick muscles, extensive body hair, and so on.
But he doesn’t actually look like a Neandertal. Because he’s got an immense lantern jaw, that no Neandertal ever had. He’s got a short conical skull, while Neandertals had elongated narrow skulls. He’s 7 feet tall, while Neandertals were short. And there’s no evidence that Neandertals were hairier than modern humans.
So you have to be careful about what traits you consider atavistic. But sure, out of 7 billion people on planet Earth you can find people on the far ends of multiple bell curves.
I wasn’t implying that any of those traits were atavisms, just that atavisms would be a small number of traits. To get clear human atavisms, maybe you would have to reach further back, like if someone happened to be born with opposable toes.
Coming from a large family with large families being most common, when we have a ‘throwback’ it refers to a person that looked very like a great grand mother’s great uncle that looked totally different from all the last few generations worth of relatives.
No doubt a member of the family but with no particular marriages that would account for it or repetitions of these particular visual & sometimes physiological traits between these outliers.
We have had a few normal looking people who acted like they might be from very long ago ( cave man/person ) but that really does not count… Bawahahaha
Resemblance to what we think a caveman may look like is not very meaningful. Something like a pronounced brow may be related to some specific genes or just formed from the constraints of a particular skull shape controlled by a number of unrelated genes or from environmental factors. The same could be said about any facial feature. We only guess at what our distant ancestors looked like.
They are called ‘sports’ in conversation in Britain. Not the same as ‘good sports’.
Writers like Conan Doyle, Kipling and Francis Galton made great sport with the idea: not necessarily a re-emergence of cavemen types so much ( although these are not uncommon in the rougher occupations ), but a reversion to previous versions.
“Caveman” is not a scientific term. We are cavemen. That is, people who looked just like us lived in caves not that long ago.
As noted, some primitive* traits might show themselves under some circumstances, but you are not going to randomly assembly the DNA of a human ancestor from 500,000 years ago out of our modern gene pool. In the sense that I think you are using the term, no it’s not possible.
*Primitive just meaning traits that we no longer see in current populations.
Still do, in some places. Excavating a nice, multi-room home in a clay hill and shoring it up can make for a house with great insulation for a relatively small amount of effort.
Have you not watched an NFL game lately? 
