The Clan of the Cave Bear

The Clan of the Cave Bear is a prehistoric adventure novel that became a best-seller when it was published in 1980 by the American author, Jean M. Auel. The first of Auel’s Earth’s Children series of novels, The Clan of the Cave Bear tells the story of a five-year-old Cro-Magnon girl living 18,000 years ago during the Quaternary Ice Age who loses her entire family after a devastating earthquake.

Ayla is a blond-haired, blue-eyed Cro-Magnon girl living in Prehistoric Europe when her entire family and its camp is destroyed by an earthquake. For days on end, the five-year-old wanders alone, naked and starving. After she just barely escapes with her life from a run-in with a vicious cave tiger that mauls her leg, Ayla collapses.

An indeterminate amount of time later, a medicine woman named Iza who belongs to a group of Neanderthals called “The Clan” finds Ayla and rescues her. She brings the little girl back to her people, who with their leader Brun are also searching for a new home in the wake of the same earthquake that killed Ayla’s family. Despite suspicion of Ayla’s looks from the stockier, darker-hued Neanderthals who refer to her as one of “The Others,” Iza and her brother Creb, the “Mo-gur” or shaman of the Clan, adopt the little girl as their own.



As Ayla regains her strength, the rest of the Clan’s opinion of Ayla brightens considerably, especially when she wanders from the Clan one day while its members argue over the difficulty of finding a new home. When the Clan discovers where Ayla has run off to, they see she has inadvertently led them to a massive cave structure that serves as the perfect new home. To many, Ayla is now the Clan’s good luck charm, and they will therefore protect her at any cost.

Despite this, tensions still arise between Ayla and the Clan. Communication is strained because the Clan, unlike Ayla, relies only on sign language and express almost nothing with their faces. For example, when Ayla starts crying one day, the gesture is so alien to Iza that she believes Ayla must suffer from some eye disease. As Ayla comes of age, she also breaks the Clan’s taboo against women handling weapons. This is in part due to the fact that many of the Clan’s duties, tasks, and customs are passed down ancestrally, meaning the members only need to be shown something once before they have mastered it. Meanwhile, Ayla is at a disadvantage when it comes to the community’s more traditional womanly duties because, like most people, she must practice something over and over again before mastering it.

For this reason, Iza fears that Ayla will never find a husband. To ensure Ayla has a place in the Clan, she begins to teach Ayla her own trade, grooming her to become the group’s next medicine woman should Iza perish. This is a huge commitment on Iza’s part as it would be much easier to train her own daughter, Uba. This is because Uba, like her mother Iza, belongs to the ancestral lineage of the most respected medicine women of all the world’s known Clans.



Moreover, some members of the Clan still do not trust and accept Ayla as one of them. This is especially true of Broud, the narcissistic and ego-driven son of the Clan’s leader, Brun. At first, Broud simply doesn’t like Ayla because of the attention she receives, which he feels should be showered on him as the Clan’s leader’s son. However, as the two mature past puberty, their rivalry takes a violent turn when Broud rapes Ayla. While Ayla is traumatized by the attack, she is happy to discover she is pregnant, even if it’s with the child of her rapist. After the child is born, Ayla must fight to prevent him from being taken away, as the Clan considers her baby to be “deformed” because it shares half of Ayla’s genes and does not look like the rest of them.

Having just barely held onto custody of her child, things go from bad to worse when Creb dies and Broud, Ayla’s primary antagonist, ascends to a leadership role. Among his first decrees is to take Ayla’s baby away and banish Ayla from the Clan. At the end of the book, Ayla is back where she started: alone with no family.

While audiences appreciated Auel’s rollicking adventure yarn, propelling The Clan of the Cave Bear to the top of the best-seller list, many critics and anthropologists took issue with what they perceived as racist attitudes inherent in the book. Auel, many argue, relies on junk science and society’s prejudices when she characterizes the more savage, primitive Neanderthals as resembling people of African descent while describing the more sophisticated Cro-Magnons with decidedly Aryan traits, like Ayla’s blond hair and blue eyes. The only scientific studies that support this contention are not scientific at all but rather akin to the kind of work done in the 19th and early 20th centuries to evangelize racial superiority among whites.



Nevertheless, the book’s impact on popular culture is undeniable as The Clan of the Cave Bear went on to achieve massive sales around the world and spawn five more books in Auel’s Earth’s Children series.