The Clan of the Cave Bear

"I have my well-thumbed copy here. It’s is the first in a series of six, the last one of which was published in 2011. This was published in 1980. I chose this one because it’s interesting for a number of reasons. One is personal. I read this when I was quite young (probably twelve or thirteen). It was hugely formative, although I didn’t realise it at the time, not only in terms of making me think the Palaeolithic is interesting, but also, the power of this book is not just its story. You have a young, female protagonist—a Homo sapiens toddler who gets lost during an earthquake. She’s wandering, nearly starved, and nearly dying when she’s found by a group of Neanderthals, and they take her in. This book and the rest of the series of novels are about her life, and if you’re a young girl, that’s appealing, especially because she is incredibly resilient and skilled. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The power of these books and of Jean Auel’s work is that she took huge amounts of time to research the archaeology, even bush skills: how you survive, what you could eat. She also describes the environment. For some people, she does this in mind-numbing detail; for me, it was incredibly inspirational detail. What does the mammoth steppe look like? What does it smell like? She’ll even talk about the grittiness that’s always in your teeth because there’s a constant wind blowing off the glaciers that contains this stuff we call loess, which is a talcum-fine sediment made up of ground-up rock that glaciers produce. We find this stuff, metres deep, in deposits all over northern Europe. The fact that it’s in your teeth all the time and that level of detail of world building is what made these books particularly powerful for me; but not just me. So many people you encounter as an archaeologist have also read this book and were affected or inspired. Not always loving it—if they read it when they were forty, then there might be less of an impact; it’s quite funny. But for a lot of people who read it when they were younger, it really was something significant. I think it’s an important part of the milieu of Neanderthal imagining for that reason. Also, there are intriguing elements that chime with The Inheritors . Golding’s ideas of the Neanderthals are that they’re not very verbal, but can share memories with each other. They can tune in to each other’s thinking and they can gain some knowledge from memories that are shared. The same thing goes on in Jean Auel’s novels. It’s never really stated; it’s just an ability they have. The Neanderthals in The Clan of the Cave Bear also have something a little bit like this, but how you feel about them as a reader is completely different to how you feel about Golding’s Neanderthals. Golding’s Neanderthals are interesting, but they’re also quite pitiful because they just cannot cope with what’s happening to them. Whereas Jean Auel was the first person to present Neanderthals as another kind of human: people you could live with, who would take in, love, and care for a girl, and share their own stories, and all of this. It was a key moment in how we allowed ourselves to extend another level of humanity to Neanderthals. It’s true that there’s a fair amount one can be critical of too about some of the elements of the storytelling, especially in the later books. For example, the girl, Ayla, leaves the Neanderthal group and meets some Homo sapiens , and there’s a whole new narrative that developes. She has this great love affair, and it turns out that the guy is, at least from a modern feminist perspectives, a gaslighting bastard! But still, this is a book that was progressive in trying to refuse earlier stereotypes of Neanderthals as inherently bestial in some form: that’s what The Clan of the Cave Bear is really about. Yes, but I think it’s interesting because I don’t think he’s trying to stick with his contemporaries’ view of Neanderthals, which were actually improving in the 1950s; I think he intentionally makes them a bit more bestial. They crawl around. This is it. Obviously, it’s a story about Neanderthals, but it’s about the encounters between cultures and the propensity of some cultures to see difference and to focus on the negative. As well as making the Neanderthals more animal-like, he also gives the Homo sapiens pottery and alcohol, though archaeologists at the time weren’t saying that Palaeolithic humans had those things. He’s stretching that distance between the two species, even more than it was, to make a point. At the very end of The Inheritors , when you get this perspective flip in that last chapter, you’ve spent the whole book in the company of these strange creatures, but you’ve become emotionally connected with them, and then you see them through the eyes of the Homo sapiens . All they can see is this hideous creature, this beast, and they don’t perceive any humanity there. That’s a jolt. Whereas in Jean Auel’s book, from the outset it’s assumed that Neanderthals are people and that you are going to relate to them. She does write in that sense very well. They’re all individual characters. They all have deep emotional resonances, and most of them are extremely caring towards the girl in the story."