Humans hadn't arrived in America at this point and pretty sure cavemen/cro-magnons/neanderthals (they looked like one of the North American species rather than Paleo-Indians) were never in the US either
shareYea this is a pretty big flaw in the movie, as the Indians (not the cavemen, who were in Eurasia and Africa at the time) did not arrive in the Americas until thousands of years later.
shareNone of you were there, you don't have a single idea who was around North America at that point in history. It's all speculation. Observable Science is completely different than historical science--which is majority speculation and hypothesis.
In the year 30,000 AD when people visit North America, and lets say it's isolated, and they find no bones, or ruins, or structures, will they assume that no one ever lived here too? I think not. Just because there are no bones, or fossils, doesn't mean something wasn't there.
I don't know why some make such an effort to find what they consider "plot holes" in movies. In my opinion, the opening scene was included to establish a scale of time for how long extraterrestrial life could have been in the universe and on Earth. Nothing more.
Rather than be impressed with people who try so hard to find such inconsistencies in movies, I can't help but just shake my head at the probability that they're never able to just sit back, suspend disbelief for a little while, and simply enjoy the story in a movie.
That was plain stupid on the writers. Neanderthals never even made it to America. They should've had the alien fighting a cave bear, dire wolf, or American lion. Another thing was that Skully could've found a fire axe and knocked the door down herself to get Mulder.
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