Nubile Savage



"Three figures stepped into his line of vision. They were obviously female. They were abundantly female. They were not wearing a great deal of clothing and seemed to be altogether too fresh-from-the-hairdressers for people who have just been paddling a large war canoe, but this is often the case with beautiful Amazonian warriors."

- Terry Pratchett, Interesting Times

The life of a Noble Savage can be pretty hard, what with all the dirt, parasites, lack of proper medicine, sanitation, nutrition, etc. It's not surprising that a good number of cavemen are nasty, brutish, and short. But their women more than make up for it. Your average cavewoman has the body of a pinup model, with long legs, shapely hips, a flat stomach, thin arms, and an impressive set of bam-bams, all nicely framed by a few scraps of animal hide, regardless of the weather. For extra bling, she may even wear a Feather Boa Constrictor. Her skin is clear and fresh; her teeth are perfect; her hair is no more than artfully tousled. She has no body hair whatsoever, and no cuts on her legs despite shaving with what could only be a jagged rock. Her features often look suspiciously like she's wearing expertly applied modern cosmetics rather than, say, clay and crushed berries. It's enough to make you wonder why we crawled out of the Stone Age.

When a woman or girl from prehistory or from an uncivilized clime is depicted as a ravishingly sexy bombshell, she is a Nubile Savage. Savage men can also be examples of this one, especially if they're impressively muscled and garbed in a leopard-skin loincloth. Or less.

Of course, if you'll watch a National Geographic-type documentary, you'll quickly see that women in cultures removed from civilization, while often topless, do not generally resemble Hollywood models. To start, well, Duh, wherever you're looking they're going to have the splay of mainly average-looking people. To the last point, that's from our perspective, anyway (they have rather different standards of beauty, after all). They are also real people, and thus not pre-approved for attractiveness and nudity by a casting director.

The standard look for The Chief's Daughter and Jungle Princess. Less standard but still common for the Indian Maiden.

Contrast National Geographic Nudity.

Anime and Manga

 * Quell from Yami to Boushi to Hon no Tabibito.
 * In Jungle de Ikou!, the main character Natsumi can transform into the extremely busty Nubile Savage Mii by doing a Fan Service-y dance. Take one look at her, and you won't be surprised to learn that Mii is a goddess of fertility and reproduction.
 * San from Princess Mononoke is quite pretty and well groomed for somebody Raised by Wolves, aside from the fact that her face is often smeared with blood. It may have something to do with the fact that the wolves that raised her are also magical Shinto demigods.
 * This applies to both men and women in Wild Rock who all look far too perfect for the setting.
 * Rocket Girls: The first time we see Matsuri, she's shown as a Nubile Savage. She quickly catches on to modern life, but never completely lets go of her roots.

Comic Books

 * Most caveman/amazon-themed superheroes adopt the Nubile Savage look.
 * Shakira from The Warlord. (Tara at least hails from the mightiest city in all of Skartaris.)
 * Panther Woman, Juliette Burber's alter ego in 9 Chickweed Lane
 * Cavewoman might be the most exaggerated example, especially when drawn by creator Budd Root—he really has a thing for huge breasts. Even though she's not an actual cavewoman, she lived as one for most of her life and still manages to look hotter than most supermodels. Plus her body was "hardened" as a result of time traveling.
 * Shanna The She-Devil, especially when drawn by Frank Cho in her relaunch.
 * The eponymous heroine of Jungle Girl, for the same exact reason.
 * The Savage Land in the Marvel Universe. The entire place. The ONLY reason for the existance of a tropical region in the middle of the Antarctic is so that residents and visitors can fit this trope.
 * Navis in the first issue of Sillage.

Fan Works

 * With Strings Attached has a whole village of these in the Hunter's world.

Film

 * Loana the Fair One (Raquel Welch, pictured above) in One Million Years B.C.
 * Katniss, from The Hunger Games, is rather tall and healthy-looking for someone who nearly died of starvation as a child and hunts and kills her own food to survive.
 * Weena (played by Yvette Mimieux) in the 1960 version of The Time Machine.
 * Tarzan, from the Disney movie of the same name. He figured out shaving by himself.
 * Pocahontas - Also in the Disney camp, the titular character one of the more obvious examples of the trope as she and her people are referred to as "savages".
 * Princess Kida from Atlantis: The Lost Empire toes the line of this trope—the city of Atlantis is by no means a savage civilization, but then again, Kida herself has been alive since the Flood itself.
 * Estella Warren as Daena in the 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes, not to mention her predecessor, Linda Harrison as Nova in the 1968 original.
 * 1981's Caveman had Barbara Bach as a cavewoman, while the cavemen tended to look like Ringo Starr. And they fight dinosaurs.
 * Fur Bikini vehicle When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth had Victoria Vetri in the role, but she didn't just fight dinosaurs -- she tamed them! Well, until it abandons her for no particular reason.
 * Caroline Munro in At the Earth's Core.
 * Pretty much everyone in 10,000 BC under the age of thirty, male or female.
 * Sean Connery in Zardoz, inasmuch as a Speedo counts as "savage."
 * Used as a gag in the 2009 version of Land of the Lost The females of Chakah's species look like this (scantly clad, brown women).
 * The Na'vi from Avatar. Their teeth are either white or slightly off-white, no one but Jake ever seems to get dirty, and their hair is pretty much perfect all the time. The Na'vi females do not always cover their National Geographic breasts. Count Neytiri, Princess of the Omaticaya Tribe, is the most famous among the female Na'vi.
 * Just because they're aliens doesn't mean they don't know about baths.
 * Kinda averted in the foreign language film (foreign to everybody) Quest for Fire (Hey, it's Ron Perlman!). Rae Dawn Chong and the other early homo sapiens were plenty nubile, but being covered in clay and occasionally mud and dirt and being placed in some pretty unpleasant situations meant that it wasn't really highlighted all that much.
 * The National Lampoon's Stoned Age has not only the girl-next-door Fardart (Ali Larter), but also a tribe of Hot Amazons ruled by Carol Alt playing Queen Fallopia.
 * The entire female cast of Prehistoric Women.

Literature

 * Though not scantily clad, Ayla the Cro-Magnon heroine of Jean Auel's Earth's Children series fits this trope. Auel goes to great lengths to justify this - Ayla learns to brush her hair with a teasel pod, swims and bathes regularly, eats a varied diet, and even wears a leather band around her explicitly large and perky breasts. Darryl Hannah from the movie qualifies on both counts.
 * Eudena from H. G. Wells' The Idler wasn't scantily clad insomuch as completely free of clothing whatsoever. Nice.
 * Any pre-technological female in an Edgar Rice Burroughs book will qualify, though they frequently don't bother with the Fur Bikini. Men from the same civilizations are almost invariably described as ugly.
 * Lin Carter's works, like Edgar Rice Burroughs', tend to show females from pre-technological tribes this way.
 * Tarzan. Unlike the apes who raised him, he loved water, and swam and bathed regularly. When puberty hit, he taught himself to shave with a knife he found in his father's cabin. He taught himself to only shave the face while leaving his scalp alone, too.
 * Rincewind of the Discworld series came into contact with a tribe of these after spending a very long time alone on a deserted island. Unfortunately, the long solitude and monotonous diet had left him a bit addled and had left a few of his desires severely crossed... he thought that the beautiful young women who wanted him to help them continue their bloodlines wanted to give him potatoes. It probably didn't help that Discworld wizards are required to be celibate; he already had half a lifetime's worth of experience suppressing his desires - and a fairly horrific memory of what happens when wizards do reproduce to give him a bit more impetus to keep those desires firmly fixated on innocuous root vegetables.
 * Mowgli from The Jungle Books, especially as a young teenager in the second book. Looks more mature than his years because "hard exercise, the best of good eating, and baths whenever he felt in the least hot or dusty, had given him strength and growth far beyond his age". And he too doesn't bother with clothing at all when there are no humans around to make him.
 * Stealing a page from Edgar Rice Burroughs (as did pretty much the entire book), the Gura males in Robert E. Howard's novel Almuric look like Neanderthals while the females look like fashion models.

Live-Action TV

 * Cavegirl - Cavegirl herself from the children's BBC series of the same name. A large proportion of the cast in fact.
 * Leela from Doctor Who. (Although after her first episode, she's living in the TARDIS, which presumably offers better sanitation and hygiene facilities.)
 * Not quite fitting the trope, as she was a descendant of a survey team that had degenerated. They also had some technological access.
 * More obscurely, Nanina from wiped Hartnell serial "The Savages."
 * It could be argued that the kangs from "Paradise Towers" are an urban jungle example, though better dressed.
 * Veronica Layton from Sir Arthur Conan Doyles the Lost World.
 * Star Trek - Spock and McCoy meet one of these in 'All Our Yesterdays' in the original series. It turns out
 * The series' penchant for Green Skinned Space Babes and various Anvillicious messages about tolerance led to quite a few Nubile Savages, but a notable one is in The Paradise Syndrome, where Kirk gets Amnesia and is believed to be divine by a group of Native Americans In Space. He is promptly married to The Chief's Daughter, Miramanee, who plays the Nubile Savage role to a T.
 * There's one of these in the 1991 Land of the Lost series.
 * Cole from Power Rangers Wild Force although not his Sentai counterpart.
 * Although Jan from Juken Sentai Gekiranger fulfills this all too well.
 * One wonders how those two got here ahead of Maya from Power Rangers Lost Galaxy.
 * Because Maya's tribe had a fair level of technology and housing etc., rather than being savages. Thy just wore Fur Binkinis and the like, for some reason.
 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
 * In the episode "Beer Bad", a cursed batch of beer turns a bunch of frat boys into cavemen, with crooked teeth, heavy brow ridges, plenty of extra hair - and Buffy, who had plenty to drink, just looks like Buffy with sexy-unkempt hair.
 * Also true of Sineya, the first Slayer.

Music

 * The classic Was (Not Was) music video for "Walk The Dinosaur" features four such women dancing to the song.

Tabletop Games

 * Female Jungle Giants in Dungeons & Dragons, particularly the Kara-Tur setting of Forgotten Realms. Truthfully, not all of them fit the Trope, but the 2nd Edition illustration in Monster Manual made them such via Memetic Mutation

Video Games

 * Ayla, in Chrono Trigger, as well as the generic adult cavewomen. Kino is also pretty, well-groomed and clean shaven.
 * Lilika of Rogue Galaxy.
 * Can you say Shaak Ti from The Force Unleashed? Or her sassy young apprentice, Maris Brood.
 * You can play one in Fallout 2. Many characters find the fact that you are a "tribal" quite attractive.
 * Krystal from the Star Fox series. At least for her first appearance.
 * Mariana Mamba, the first super-agent you rile up in Evil Genius is one of these, being the "tamed" last of her Amazon tribe and everything. Even her special power is an exotic allure that dramatically drains the Loyalty stat of any nearby minions.
 * Zhu Rong from Dynasty Warriors.
 * Sheva's tribal costume in Resident Evil 5.
 * Elena from Street Fighter III.
 * Most of the cavegirls from the Joe and Mac series.
 * Crazed Natives and Amazons in the original Might and Magic.
 * Tyrus Flare the Amazon from Golden Axe.

Web Comics

 * Dawn from Dawn of Time. Partially inspired at least by Raquel Welch.
 * Both Helen and Mell from Narbonic after spending a few months trapped on a tropical island.
 * Surprisingly, Leena from Looking for Group provided an example.
 * Angora of The Meek counts as a subversion. She spends most of her introduction chapter wearing nothing, but by physicality she's not much different from a regular fit teenage girl.
 * Tangerine of Sinfest, after Satan bomphs her, wears the appropriate attire and acts in total obliviousness to society, though not with the usual Exposed to the Elements results.

Western Animation

 * Futurama has an entire planet of Amazonian women. Amy briefly dressed like one.
 * Maybe three-quarters of all the women on The Flintstones would count. The men, not so much.