It was long and maybe just a little too descriptive at times... but incredibly creative. I couldn't put it down. Also, I listened to the audiobook. Narrator was okay, but read a bit fast and with without enough inflection at times... this got better as the story progressed. All in all a fabulous read. Looking forward to book two.

This was a great pick! I thoroughly enjoyed this read!
Set during prehistoric times, Ayla’s Home and her family are lost to a devastating earthquake. Homeless and alone she wanders the land, barely surviving, until she is found by Iza - a member of The Clan.
Ayla struggles to fit in and to be accepted by The Clan, its customs foreign to her. Their treatment of women being the main hurdle - all women are below men in status, expected to cook for the men, never to ignore a direct order from a man and certainly never allowed to hunt!
As time progresses The Clan become accustomed to the different girl, and she integrates. But not everyone is so understanding- Broud, the son of the Clan leader hates Ayla fiercely and will do whatever necessary to bring her down! With some scenes slightly shocking, I couldn’t stop turning the pages!
This novel was full of vivid descriptions, including the way cave people lived - their local sources of food, clothing and intricate belief system. A wonderful selection of characters, I was reminded of the Disney film ‘Brother Bear’ where each Clan member has a spirit totem, in the form of an animal - I was fully engrossed in this world, and look forward to continuing it.

Ik vind geschiedenis altijd wel interessant. Helaas is dit boek niks voor mij. Na een tijdje weet je wel wat hun voedsel is, welke wapens ze gebruiken en hoe de verhoudingen en regels zijn in de stam. Uiteindelijk vond ik het maar langdradig worden en werd ik er zelfs slaperig van. Nee wat dat betreft had ik liever een kort en bondig verhaal over deze stam gelezen in plaats van dat het zo erg uitgerekt is.

Sometimes I wanted to throw this book out the window. Or at someone. It's a hefty little paperback, and my copy is old enough that it the pages no longer lie quite next to each other on the spine, so it looks even bigger than it is. I have no doubt that if it were to hit someone in the head, it could seriously annoy that person and even cause a headache. That's often the feeling I experienced while reading The Clan of the Cave Bear. But I wouldn't turn this book into a projectile out of mere spite or desire to cause headaches. No, the temptation was purely an urge to remove the book from my vicinity as quickly as possible.

I apologize for the somewhat lengthy and uncharacteristic paragraph of plot summary that follows. I promise it has a point.

In a world of long, harsh winters and short summers, the Clan of the Cave Bear is a humanoid civilization that worships Ursus for bringing them culture and traditions. There are many clans within the Clan, each of which live in their own caves, have their own leaders and medicine women and mog-urs (shamans). One such clan, led by the fair-minded Brun, is searching for a new cave after theirs was destroyed in an earthquake. They stumble across an injured five-year-old child—but she is not Clan. She is a member of the Others, a strange species that looks humanoid but is not Clan. Brun reluctantly allows his medicine woman to care for the child, whose name is Ayla. For the most part this brings his clan great luck, but Ayla has a lot of trouble fitting in. She fails to conform to the Clan standards for women, preferring instead to hunt and assert herself in ways permitted only to men. And she earns the ire of the future leader of the clan, the impetuous Broud. Through the eyes of Ayla and members of Brun's clan, Jean Auel tells a story about family, acceptance, loyalty, honour, tradition, and yes, race.

There is just one problem.

This book is actually set 30,000 years ago in prehistoric Europe. The Clan are the Neanderthals, while the Others are Cro-Magnons, anatomically modern Homo sapiens sapiens. While this might not sound problematic—and I admit that I'm probably weird seeing it as a problem—it is the one element of this book that I cannot overlook.

I know this book is insanely popular (especially given its subject matter). I might even have read it at some point in the distant past (14? 16? I don't recall). To be honest, I probably wouldn't have ever picked up this book again were it not for the fact that I inherited it from a friend who moved away. I like historical fiction, but prehistorical fiction is another matter.

Historical fiction is based, in addition to archaeological evidence, primary source material like written records, artwork, and if it's more recent, photography and audio or video recordings. The farther back in time one goes, the sparser the record and the more difficult it is to portray a society "realistically". Often this isn't a problem; it's fiction, after all, and we expect some licence.

Prehistory is different. By definition there are not written records; there are pressure few remnants of artwork, and much to our chagrin, the Neanderthals recorded everything on Betamax or, much later, in whatever format the Zune uses. (And who has one of those these days?) So their voices are probably lost to us forever. We can speculate, but it is very difficult to determine what Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon culture was like from the archaeological record. This gives archaeologists and anthropologists plenty to do when they are not actually in ur fields, diggin' up ur ancestors. It lets them form (perhaps untestable) hypotheses about homonin societies based on what evidence we do have. That's really cool, and I love reading non-fiction books about such theories. The dearth of solid information, however, makes the job of a writer of prehistorical fiction that much more difficult. I'm not going to rule out all prehistorical fiction from this one experience, but Auel has not convinced me The Clan of the Cave Bear is a shining example of the genre.

I actually reached a point where I had to break out the sticky notes and mark a few pages for later reference. This happens on occasion with a book, usually if it's really bad or really good. In this case, the quotations highlight my issue with the way Auel portrays the evolutionary competition between Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. In The Clan of the Cave Bear, Neanderthals possess a genetic memory that is nearing its maximum storage capacity:

But as more memories built up, crowding and enlarging the storage capacity of their brain, changes came harder. There was no more room for new ideas that would be added to their memory bank, their heads were already too large. Women had difficulty giving birth; they couldn't afford new knowledge that would enlarge their heads even more.

Suffice it to say, there is no record of Neanderthals, or any hominins, possessing a genetic memory. It's true that The Clan of the Cave Bear is steeped in scientific accuracy; Auel did her research. This is not one of those accuracies. This appears to be something of her own invention (or an idea she borrowed from another theorist), and quite frankly, it breaks the book for me. Despite trite allusions to evolution and nature, Auel's proposed reason for the demise of the Neanderthals runs contrary to very idea of Darwinian evolution:

Her brain followed different paths, her full, high forehead that housed forward-thinking frontal lobes gave her an understanding from a different view. She could accept the new, shape it to her will, forge it into ideas undreamed of by the Clan, and, in nature's way, her kind was destined to supplant the ancient, dying race.

At a deep, unconscious level, Broud sensed the opposing destinies of the two. Ayla was more than a threat to his masculinity, she was a threat to his existence. His hatred of her was the hatred of the old for the new, of the traditional for the innovative, of the dying for the living. Broud's race was too static, too unchanging. They had reached the peak of their development; there was no more room to grow. Ayla was part of nature's new experiment, and though she tried to model herself after the women of the clan, it was only an overlay, a façade only culture-deep, assumed for the sake of survival.

Evolution does not work that way. Species do not reach "peaks" of development and find "no more room to grow". The extinction of the Neanderthals was not destiny.

Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that Auel is saying that Cro-Magnons were "destined" to supplant Neanderthals or that the Neanderthals were necessarily doomed as a result of their genetic memory. She could be saying that. If so, I find it very problematic. I cannot countenance calling this book "historical fiction" and lauding its scientific accuracy if Auel rejects something so fundamental as the theory of evolution.

It's also possible to interpret all of this as an attempt to be poetic—hence, the references to "destiny" and such are the twentieth-century narrator's hindsight being applied to the story at hand. This does not absolve Auel entirely, for it is still an example of sloppy writing, but at least it is, in my mind, a lesser crime. And this is consistent with the narration in The Clan of the Cave Bear in general, which is itself rather inconsistent. The book switches between following one particular character's thoughts from a limited third-person perspective to an omniscient twentieth-century perspective. This is accompanied by a corresponding change in vocabulary. Consequently, all complaints about the science aside, I had a hard time even reading this book. I felt almost like I was reading some kind of children's story. Here's an example:

The women breathed easier. They knew Ayla was inexperienced, and though they had little choice but to allow the girl to treat Brac, they were concerned. A hunter needed two good strong arms. If Brac lost the use of one, he would never become a leader as he was destined. If he was unable to hunt, he would not even become a man, but would live out his life in the ambiguous limbo in which older boys, who had reached physical maturity but had not made their first kill, existed.

I picked that by opening the book at random. The entire book is littered with phrases like, "They knew", "Ayla knew", "Creb knew", etc., which preface exposition by Auel that shows off her extensive research into various prehistorical methods of life. I love that she did all that research, and in some ways it does improve the book. Unfortunately, Auel often chooses to divulge her knowledge in the least engaging way possible.

No, this book works much better when viewed as a fantasy or science-fiction novel about a world far, far away. As I set it up in my plot summary at the beginning of this review, one can easily ignore the references to our Earth of the past and treat the Clan and the Others as two alien species, one with genetic memory that is proving a liability. In this way, the problematic parts of the story's narration become more forgivable, and The Clan of the Cave Bear becomes a fascinating thought experiment. Now, I might be a literary snob, but I'm no literary tyrant, and you are free to regard this book as historical fiction if you like. I wish I could have enjoyed this book more, because it had a lot of potential, and there are some genuinely great things about it—alas, certain aspects of Auel's style and writing were enough to sour the experience for me.

n  n

3 stars



It’s official, my tastes are slowly changing in books. I didn’t love this book as much as I did. And I find at times I love a particular book in a series and I’ll just keep that physical book and trade in the rest. What’s the point of keeping things you just don’t love any more.

I have the beautiful mass market paperbacks of these books. I loved the second book at the time but we shall see and I want to finish them out. I have this first book on kindle and audible as well. I might just get the other ones if I like them in those formats. I just don’t know.

I love Ayla and her animals dearly, but I just don’t like reading certain things any more.

Mel

The Clan of the Cave Bear has always been one of my favorite books. I think I've read it 8-10 times now, and it never gets old. This time reading it as an adult I was able to connect a lot better with the plot as it held a lot of adult themes compared to when I was eight. Yes, my parents were that sort.

Jean M. Auel has such a strong writing voice that helps you really connect with the characters and their surroundings.

I have always been a bit obsessed with prehistory, herbal tinctures, and tribal life in general so this book will always be on my bookshelf. I do have to finish the series, though.

Auel's books were the first taste (at the age of eight years old) of prehistory reading. After reading each book, each time, I would flick through afterward and write notes about herbs and draw them how they were described.

I even ran away once to live in a cave. Let's just leave it at that.

I will never stop recommending this book.
EVER. Even if you just read it once.

This story was great! As I was reading I totally lost my self in the story. The descriptions and well researched information took me back in time and I could almost hear the grunts, the crackle of the fire and smell the meat roasting! Sometimes though, details were a little much and I felt anxious to get on with the story when the author was explaining the tedious steps involved in making a weapon or such things like that. After finishing the book I have a yearning for simplicity. I set out to enjoy nature and nurish my body with the earth. My fitness trainers have been bothering me to try this new Paleo diet, (where we eat like cave men,) and after reading the descriptions of Ayla's lean long body I have decided to try it!

impressive saga of when life wasn't easy & relying on one life and death matter.
Jean did a good job bringing a whole ancient culture to life, well done.

A quick note- I call this a "historical fiction" since it is set in Prehistoric Europe during the Ice Age (the Pleistocene Epoch lasted from 35,000-25,000 BCE with a period of interstadial, a warming period during which the events of the book take place). Thus much of the story is backed up by a great deal of research. So why this note? I wish to issue a cautionary note to her description of "shared memory" (which is still very misunderstood outside certain animals) and her calling it "telepathy". I understand where she is going with that logic, but she treads perilously close to fantasy IMHO. But ignoring that tidbit the rest of the story is quite plausible and the herbs/foods/utensils are quite accurate to the time.

The Clan of the Cave Bear are Neanderthals. As they are migrating to look for a new cave, they come across a little girl named Ayla. Ayla is one of the Others (Cro-Magnon). The rest of the story is how Ayla integrates into the Clan. Through the characters, Jean Auel is able to transport the reader into the practices and the daily life of this Clan. Their foods, rituals, traditions are all here and plausibly explained. I really enjoyed and was impressed with the author's depth of research for many of the things that she mentions- from medicinal herbs, foodstuffs, the creation and use of utensils.

The story is also fun and exciting. Ayla's attempts to integrate into the Clan serve to illustrate the differences between the two types of humans. One can read between the lines and see the inevitable end of the Clan, in terms of biological advancement, throughout the story as they seem unable to truly adapt to radically new environments. However, these are not savages banging on rocks. There is drama, politics, honor and spiritual rituals all well explained throughout the story. If you are interested in what life was like during this time, then Ayla's adventures with the Clan will be your gateway into this world.

Well written, easy to read and doing a great job of explaining daily life without being pedantic-this was a really fun read. I look forward to finding the rest of this series and finishing it. I would highly recommend this to any fan of historical fiction set in Prehistoric times.

I couldn't resist not to put on paper what itched my mind when I finished the first book of the "Earth's Children" series, brilliantly written, researched, and imagined by Jean Auel and named "The Clan of the Cave Bear". I think I mentioned once earlier that when it comes to novels or movies, one particular way of story telling I prefer the most.

No matter what the genre is, I do like all stories with strong characters in lead roles. This is probably the main reason why I keep remembering their names instead of the titles of the books, movies, or shows. For example, I am a big fan of Mulder, House, Holden, Langdon, Valter, Kirk, Kate, Piper, Cross, Kovacs, Maximus, Hal, Woody, Neo, Yoda, Doc Brown, etc., and if you ask me to write all the titles of these characters' stories, I would probably have to google and find out the most of them. With "Earth's Children" novels, I am sure I gain one more name to the pile.

It is still fresh in my brain today, but I am sure if you, in the (near) future, ask me for a recommendation of the best and most iconic prehistoric adventures of ancient Neanderthal clans and their interactions with homo sapiens, I would most likely say go and read about Ayla.

I have to admit that I got fed up with all the repetitions and sex scenes, but it was worthwhile read nonetheless. Or watch the movie with Darryl Hannah made in 1986 based on the first book only. Or wait for the probable upcoming FOX TV show, even though it is uncertain that it will be brought to life at this point. Nevertheless, Earth's Children definitely deserves the screen, even though it has to be a high-budget project, filmed with heavy usage of special effects similar to those used in 'Rise (Down) of the Planet of the Apes' and to use all scientific breakthroughs to picture Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons in a proper way.

Full review

The only things that are accurate in this book are contained in the endless infodumps. The facts may be well-researched, but the ideas Auel is pushing are both unscientific and obnoxious.

First and foremost, her take on evolution should be kept away from our young, who don't know any better and would believe that evolution has a purpose, from which it is but a step to intelligent design. Phrases like "nature's experiment", "in an effort to postpone extinction nature tried...", and even "destiny" creep up all the time. Look, no one knows for certain what caused Neanderthal extinction, but it was most probably a combination of external and quite random factors. Like being forced through a bottleneck by disease and then being hit by a climate change - just an example, and could have happened to us just as easily; could even happen still, actually.
I was going to cite the whole "genetic memory" as a second example, but on reflection it really doesn't need my pointing out that this is where we get firmly into the realm of fantasy, leaving speculative fiction far behind.

But even considered as a work of literature, this would be noticeably below standard. The writing is unnecessarily repetitively redundant, and leafing through the thesaurus at every opportunity doesn't make it any better. The tone and atmosphere don't exist. Whenever a feeble attempt is made by either, up pops an infodump or a disruptively modern, scientific-sounding term. And every single inference is spelled out for us stupid Cromagnons - wait, we are innovative and brilliant Cromagnons, not hidebound in tradition at all, never, never...

And don't let me forget the whole "white supremacy" message. I'll allow that Ayla's being blue-eyed blonde while everyone else is relatively swarthy may be just the author's working out a kink, to make her "ugly" when we know she's in fact beautiful, and not real true racism. But as far as I'm concerned she could be bright green and still have offensively "white" connotations. Do you guys really enjoy reading about someone who is best at everything, and I mean everything, exclusively by the right of her birth? Mastering all the Neanderthal skills of both sexes while still a kid, inventing new things, not losing anything in the emotional side of her life with all that intellect, even being the only one who sensed the earthquake! What's the challenge then? What could make an effective plot with a protagonist like that and an antagonist like a small bit of carefully blacked tough-cured hide? Ayla always wins and is always best, I'm sure the slowest reader would have grasped that after about five repetitions, and we get scores.

This is the kind of book some people recommend to young readers, thinking that the repetitions and the spelling-out are intended for them. In fact both are bad for them, disabling them as interested and active readers and conditioning them to like bad literature in general. Too bad there's so little fiction in prehistoric setting - this wouldn't have been nearly so popular else.

***
Update: I had a look at the reviews for further books in this series and found out that there is no mention of the fate of Broud's clan. What? At the end of the book, their position is almost as critical as Ayla's. What would they do next? While the clan consists of not very well-developed, frequently interchangeable characters, I was disappointed to find that even the author herself cares nothing for what would become of them. Only the blue-eyed girl matters, that's right. This would make me rate this book further down if that were possible.

-Propuesta entretenida con querencia hacia el costumbrismo paleolítico.-

Género. Novela (que no se puede denominar “histórica” por razones obvias).

Lo que nos cuenta. En un momento indeterminado del Paleolítico Superior una niña cromañón se queda sola en el mundo tras un violento terremoto. Un grupo de neardentales, que también han sido afectados por el seísmo, encuentran a la niña al borde de la muerte y la curandera del clan decide hacerse cargo de la criatura, a la que acabarán conociendo como Ayla. Primera entrega de la serie Los hijos de la Tierra.

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