The Earths Children Series by Jean M. Auel
The Earth’s Children Series is a six-volume historical fiction saga written by Jean M. Auel, centering on the character of Ayla, a Cro-Magnon woman. The narrative begins with Ayla's tragic loss and subsequent adoption by a Neanderthal clan, where she navigates her identity and cultural differences. Throughout her journey, Ayla learns to adapt to the clan's ways, facing challenges related to her outsider status and the constraints of tradition. As she develops skills in healing and hunting, her unique abilities and progressive ideas often clash with the norms of the clan.
The series explores themes of survival, cultural exchange, and the dynamics of gender roles within prehistoric societies. Ayla's story unfolds as she eventually seeks her own people and encounters various cultures, including her romantic involvement with Jondalar, who represents a different societal perspective. Their adventures take them across diverse landscapes, where they confront both external threats and internal conflicts, ultimately leading Ayla to reconcile her past with her present. Auel's richly detailed narrative interweaves historical research with imaginative storytelling, offering readers a glimpse into the lives of early humans and their interactions with one another and the natural world.
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The Earths Children Series
First published:The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980), The Valley of Horses (1982), The Mammoth Hunters (1985), and The Plains of Passage (1990)
Type of work: Novels
Type of plot: Science fiction—evolutionary fantasy
Time of work: The late Pleistocene epoch, 35,000-25,000 b.c.e.
Locale: Prehistoric Europe
The Plot
Envisioned as a six-volume history of Cro-Magnon heroine Ayla, the Earths Children series began with Jean Auels vision of a young woman living among people different from her. Having been a credit manager, technical writer, and occasional poet, Auel completed her M.B.A. in 1976 and began research on Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon peoples. Studies of animal evolution, physical remains, wild plant life, and flint knapping, along with wilderness training, allowed Auel to create a detailed geographic and cultural tapestry into which she wove fictional characters passions and ideas.
Ayla is adopted into the Neanderthal Clan of the Cave Bear on the Crimean Peninsula after her family dies in an earthquake. She unlearns her birth culture, adapting to older Clan ways, seeing her blue-eyed blondeness as ugly, and exchanging language for hand signals. She is shamed that lack of racial memories makes her ignorant in comparison to clan children who “remember.” She accepts clan totems and their spirit world. When a man “gives his signal,” she must respond and assume position to be mounted.
Quick to adapt, Ayla learns medicine woman skills from her adopted mother, Iza, saves Clan members, and remains under the protection of the one-eyed Clan shaman Creb. As an outsider, Ayla threatens ancient Clan traditions, breaks forbidden taboos, survives a death curse, becomes designated the Woman Who Hunts after mastering the forbidden slingshot, and defies Clan custom by keeping her deformed child. Cursed with death by Broud, a childhood tyrant and the new Clan leader, Ayla leaves in search of her own people.
Ayla settles in a cave in a valley shared with steppe horses. She discovers almost supernatural abilities to interact with animals. She rescues a mare, befriends a foal named Whinney, and serves as midwife at the birth of the stallion Racer. A huge cave lion named Baby and a gray wolf figure in Aylas adventures, stunning less progressive Cro-Magnons.
Far from the west, Jondalar and his brother Thonolan journey across glaciers, following the Great Mother River (Danube) from headwaters to mouth. Dazed by the death of his new mate, Thonolan faces a cave lion and dies, leaving Jondalar to be rescued by Ayla from Baby, the she lions mate. Jondalars healing, Aylas recovery of language, and the inventions of this enterprising couple (including spear throwers, fire starters of flint and iron pyrite, sewing needles, and equine harnesses) complete the second novel. The blond, blue-eyed couples love grows as Jondalar teaches Ayla about the Earth Mother and introduces her to sexual first rites she was denied in brutal encounters with Broud. Seeing sexual pleasure as the Mothers gift, Ayla learns a new cultural imperative respecting females as life source.
Ayla’s challenges continue as she and Jondalar winter with Mamutoi mammoth hunters, who reintroduce her to community and female companionship while presenting the threat of competition and a fear of her adoptive Clan (always called “flatheads” by her own kind). Considering her magical firestones, her mystical mastery over animals, and her uncanny healing powers, the old shaman Mamut adopts her into Mammoth Hearth, giving her both the family she seeks and supernatural identity matching her skills.
Ayla faces continuing prejudice because of her background. She watches the adopted child Rydag, obviously of mixed parentage, suffer the ridicule her own lost son must be encountering. Through evoking Rydag’s racial memories and teaching Clan hand signals to the Mamutoi, she convinces the Mamutoi that flatheads are human.
Ayla must also consider whether to mate with handsome Ranec, a skilled worker of ivory and the first black man she meets. She is drawn to Ranec and misunderstands Jondalars offer of freedom of choice, concluding that he rejects her. She therefore accepts Ranecs proposal. Jondalars sudden departure brings about reconciliation, setting the stage for the fourth novel, which retraces the journey across icy steppes to Jondalars home.
The Plains of Passage continues the adventure on horseback across changing geographic and climatic conditions. Ayla and Jondalar encounter a range of cultures, visit tribes he already knows, watch mating mammoths, heal a Clansmans broken leg, get caught up in a matriarchal prison culture in which a crazed leader punishes men for her girlhood abuse, cross the glacier under travail, nearly lose but manage to save the animals, meet some of Jondalars relatives, and finally reach his home, the ninth cave of the Zelandonii. Auel provides abundant description, interspersed with tribal adventures and the blossoming of Ayla and Jondalars relationship as the couple discusses art, food, and celebrations. Although the huge novel ends without a meeting with Jondalars family, Ayla recognizes his cave as one the dead Creb has led her toward in her dreams. She, too, is home.