#Ayla clan of the cave bear full
#Ayla clan of the cave bear series

The concept of the different brain-use fascinated me, because the idea of a vast racial memory to be tapped into by all members of the Clan sounded purely fantastical. Presumably much of what we learn about social structure and customs is imaginative reconstruction? How can we possibly know anything beyond what burial sites indicate to us? And how much is actually known about the Neanderthals?

I know that Auel has won praise from archaeologists and anthropologists for the way she evokes Neanderthal society and, as someone without a shred of anthropological training, I find it hard to see where ‘what was’ blends into ‘what might have been’. When you do, it is a deeply satisfying and rewarding book. Every page is thick with ideas and information and the whole world that Auel describes is so unfamiliar that you have to take it slowly. And it’s dense: although, by my current standards, 400-odd pages is not long, it took me a relatively long time to read. If anything, it’s a hard book: matter-of-fact, almost scientific in its nature. It’s not one of those novels where the language is so fluid and beautiful that you find yourself captivated by grace alone. But Ayla is determined, creative and adaptable in ways that the Clan can never be: she is a microcosm of her flexible, problem-solving race, and her very existence is a sign that time is running out for them. Chief among these is her desire, from a young age, to hunt, which threatens to go against every rule of Clan society and risks bringing down the fury of the spirits upon the whole community.

She loves to swim, while those around her are nervous of the water she can manage more intricate dexterous tasks than they can she isn’t as strong as the native women and, most crucially of all, she doesn’t seem to understand the ways in which she challenges all tradition. She may be an adopted member of the clan but, no matter what anyone does, she is not Clan: she is born to the Others and, as Ayla grows older, nature gets in the way of nurture. She learns to communicate as fluently as any other child, and proves an adept student of medicine and healing. The child, whose real name is too complex for Creb and his people to articulate, is given the closest approximation they can master: Ayla.Īs the years pass, the clan’s initial suspicion of Ayla fades and she finds a warm and loving home with Creb and his sibling Iza, and Iza’s daughter Uba. She learns that any man can command any woman, and must be obeyed that a woman must sit before a man and wait to be given permission to speak that water coming from the eyes is a strange sickness that doesn’t afflict those around her and, most of all, that they are all part of the Clan, the great wider community of people united by their common spirits and history. She must also adapt to a new set of social and cultural mores. Accustomed to speech, the child has to abandon her chattering and learn the complex system of gestures and movements with which her new community express themselves. She finds herself surrounded by a group of people who not only look very different to herself, and who find her as bizarre and unsettling as she finds them, but who also have an entirely alien concept of communication. Under the care of the clan’s medicine woman Iza, and the protection of their powerful holy man or mog-ur, Creb, the child begins to return to health. Weakened by hunger and loss of blood from an attack by a cave lion, she is providentially discovered by a clan of Neanderthal who, much against their leader’s better judgement, carry her along with them.

#Ayla clan of the cave bear full

When a five-year-old girl is orphaned by an earthquake, she finds herself alone and unskilled against the full cruelty of nature and the elements. In the aftermath of The Inheritors, I decided it was time to make a start on this other famous story about contact between Neanderthal man and the new race of Homo sapiens. And now, twenty years later, I’ve finally got round to it. I remember being very impressed by the thick novels she was carrying around, and decided that I would have to read the books myself one day.

#Ayla clan of the cave bear series

In our first years at secondary school, one of my classmates was much taken with the Earth’s Children series by Jean M.