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{{work}}
The novels revolve around "Ayla," a Cro-Magnon woman who lived about 30,000 years ago, somewhere near the Black Sea (modern-day Ukraine). Orphaned at five due to an earthquake, she is taken in by a group of Neanderthals. Auel goes into great detail on the physiology of these Neanderthals, who call themselves the [[Title Drop|Clan of the Cave Bear]] after their primary deity. The main difference between Clan and "Others" (Cro-Magnons) is that Clan have access to [[Genetic Memory]], which makes them quick studies for anything their species already knows but very slow to accept innovation or change. Ayla is adopted by the clan's medicine woman, and her brother, a crippled shaman, learning a great deal of herb lore and practical medicine, but also learns to hunt in direct defiance of the Clan's traditions. Her clan's leader (the brother of the medicine woman and shaman both) accepts her as best he can, able to recognize her talents and skills even if they make him uncomfortable, but when his snotty son takes up the mantle of leadership, the son has Ayla exiled from the Clan (after raping her). This would be easier on 14-year-old Ayla if she hadn't borne a son, Durc, a ''Homo neanderthalensis x sapiens'' hybrid that must be left behind.
From this point on, Ayla strikes out on her own, seeking her own kind. The story then begins to alternate between her point of view and that of her designated love interest, Jondalar, a Cro-Magnon from what is today France, as he journeys down the length of the "[
* ''[[The Clan of the Cave Bear]]'' (1980), from Ayla's adoption (age 5) to ostracism (age 14).
* ''[[The Valley of Horses]]'' (1982), in which Ayla lives a solitary existence in the titular location while Jondalar travels to meet her. This takes a good three or four years, with the remaining books falling into the pattern of relating one year per novel.
* ''[[The Mammoth Hunters]]'' (1985): Jondalar has just convinced Ayla to start heading for his home when they run into the novel's titular Mamutoi, who are, after Jondalar, the first Others Ayla has ever met. Ayla learns a lot about living with her own species; Jondalar learns how much he loves her when a [[Love Triangle]] is introduced.
* ''[[The Plains of Passage]]'' (1990): Jondalar and Ayla travel west along the Great Mother River, encountering various characters and peoples Jondalar had met on the way down, and some other surprises as well.
* ''[[The Shelters of Stone]]'' (2002): Jondalar and Ayla finally arrive home, where Ayla begins to integrate herself among his people (the "Zelandonii").
* ''[[The Land of Painted Caves]]'' (2011): Ayla continues her training to become a Zelandoni (priestess/medicine woman) for her tribe.
Auel is considered something of an expert on Ice-Age culture, due to the sheer amount of research (and hands-on experience) she has with the practices at hand, such as leather-tanning, flint-knapping and cave paintings. She has attempted to weave into the story as much archaeology from the period as possible, often [[Shout
Ayla is an extremely talented cook, hunter, healer and equestrian, and has single-handedly accomplished a number of technological breakthroughs, such as the discovery of making fire with flint and tinder; the domestication of the first horse (Whinny), and the first proto-dog (Wolf); the invention of the travois and sewing needle; and being (one of) the first to make the connection between sexual intercourse and reproduction. Jondalar has also showed fecundity by collaborating with her on the invention of the spear-thrower (atlatl), the sewing needle, horse tack, and "break-away" reusable spears. Thankfully, the pair didn't invent everything: alcoholic drinks are already well known (and a bit of a problem) in the depicted Cro-Magnon societies, a priestess in another tribe is said to have invented earthenware, yet another has accidented soap into existence, and in no particular order other tribally unique inventions/discoveries: charcoal, salt mining, chamois leather, boat keels and rudders.
{{franchisetropes}}
* [[All Cavemen Were Neanderthals]]: ''Definitely'' averted. Cro-Magnons still lived in caves, and Neanderthals knew how to make tents.
* [[The Aloner]]: Ayla for a good part of ''The Valley Of Horses''. She's actually surviving completely alone in the wilderness, using all the skills she learned in the Clan.
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* [[Beauty Is Bad]]: The attractive but [[Ax Crazy]] character of Attaroa and to a lesser extent with the [[Alpha Bitch]] Marona.
* [[Bigger Is Better in Bed]]: [[Deconstructed Trope]]. Jondalar is so well-endowed that he has had to hold back with basically every partner he's ever had. Made [[Anvilicious]] by the discovery that Ayla actually has has sufficient, err, "[[Character Depth]]" to fully, ahh, accept and embrace him.
* [[Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism]]: Clan men are larger and stronger than Clan women, but what makes them bizarre is that nearly ''every'' possible skill is a [[Gender
* [[Blue Eyes]]: Both Ayla and Jondalar are blue-eyed. One of the ways Ayla recognizes Jondalar as being one of her own kind (the "Others") is that he's the first man she's ever met with blue eyes like hers.
** Jondalar's blue eyes are considerably more notable, an intense glacier blue described as "magnetic" and "charismatic" and capable of seducing any woman he uses them on; Ayla's are a more plain grey-blue.
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** Brun, who would be the best leader ever if he didn't love his [[Jerkass]] son Broud so much.
** Zoug, the old hunter who is all about dignity in the face of brash young [[Jerkass|Jerk Assses]].
* [[Costume Porn]]: But to ''everyone'', not just Ayla. And justified too, since ''Earth's Children'', like ''[[
* [[Cradle of Loneliness]]: Ayla does this ''Valley of the Horses''. When she is banished from the Clan and forced to leave her son behind, the bag she used to carry him around in becomes the only memento of him.
* [[Cursed
* [[Death
* [[Does Not Like Men]]: Attaroa, a villain from the fourth book, who was apparently married to a half-Clan husband. He treated her with about the same level of respect Broud treated Ayla, and Attaroa liked it about as much. She became a violently misandric nutjob thereafter, locking all her camp's men in a pen and working them to death.
* [[A Dog Named "Dog"]]: Ayla gets a pet named Wolf. Guess what kind of animal he is.
* [[Doorstopper]]: 6 books, each ranging from
* [[Dramatis Personae]]
* [[Dystopia]]: Attaroa's band of S'Armunai has turned into a bizarre nightmare where men are kept in a large filthy cage with little food and no medicine, and slowly worked to death. The women are supposed to be the rulers -- except talking to men isn't allowed (let alone physical intimacy with your former husband), giving birth to a boy is punishable by death, and the boys themselves are subjected to horrific fates. Attaroa's also incompetent, so they're nearly out of food. Really, the whole thing is just a show for Attaroa's sadistic megalomania. Though they try to pretend they're happy (complaining and disobedience are punished by hurting one's male relatives), many women get sick of it.
* [[Eternal Sexual Freedom]]: And how! Nobody has any concept of illegitimate offspring (fatherhood not having been discovered), nor have communicable diseases been figured out yet. Consequently, both Others and Clan have fairly lax sexual norms. A certain amount of partner-rotation is permissible amongst the Others, and before you get married you get to play the field.
:In the Clan there is a hand-sign, that can only be made by men, which indicates the man wants to "relieve his needs" and the woman should drop whatever she's doing and immediately present for intercourse. It is implied that the women find this just as enjoyable as the men do. Oh, and the Clan women have found herbal versions of hormonal contraceptives, but usually do not prescribe them unless a woman might die if she gets pregnant again. And while it's considered unlucky for an unmated woman to give birth and they will try to pair her off before, only two characters are known to have connected sex with reproduction so far. (One of them is, of course, [[Mary Sue|Ayla]].)
* [[Everybody Has Lots of Sex]]: As one of the themes of the series seems to be refuting the [[Sex Is Evil]] trope, the author describes sex between Ayla and Jondalar with lots of detail.
* [[Everybody Wants the Hermaphrodite]]: Transgendered people (not that they're called that) are socially expected to become mamuti (medicine people), since they're already marked as "special" by the Great Earth Mother. They're considered quite attractive by both sexes.
* [[Explicit Content]]: This series has a great deal of story and most of the content is entirely non-sexual, but most sex scenes are unnecessarily detailed.
* [[Fantastic Racism]]: Race relations and racism are a major theme of the series. The Others call the Clan "flatheads" and claim they're animals related to bears, but despise them as unclean monsters in a stark departure from their attitudes towards actual animals (a hypocrisy Ayla points out to them). The Clan just think the Others are noisy, bizarre, and dangerous, and try to avoid them.
* [[Fee Fi Faux Pas]]: Particularly during the first book, during which Ayla usually does whatever she wants to, even if it's in direct defiance of Clan traditions. (Of course, at one point she goes so far over the line that they curse her with death. {{spoiler|She's so cool, she outlives the death curse. Also, she's cursed again, and there are five more books!}}
* [[The Film of the Book]]: For the first novel, starring [[Blade Runner|Daryl Hannah]] as Ayla.
* [[First Girl Wins|First Guy Wins]]: Ayla's longtime love, and the father of her daughter, is literally the first man of "the Others" (that is, a Cro-Magnon like Ayla herself) she meets.
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* [[Florence Nightingale Effect]]: Thonolan falls in love with his future wife Jetamio this way. He's {{spoiler|attacked by a rhino}}, and she helps the healer attend him. He almost immediately becomes infatuated. Jondalar and Ayla also meet this way, after {{spoiler|her pet lion mauls him.}}
* [[Fluffy the Terrible]]: Ayla's pet lion cub grows up to be the hugest, most well-nourished cave lion in Ukraine, and terrifies everybody who sees him. His name is Baby.
* [[Gendercide]]: This is Attaroa's ultimate goal for her people, using a concentration camp and forced labor as an intermediary step. She thinks women will just give birth to girls after all the men die.
* [[Gender Is No Object]]: All of the Others (except the violently misandric band of S'Armunai encountered by the protagonists).
* [[Gender
* [[Genetic Memory]]: The Clan have this, mostly in an unconscious form. Only an extremely skilled mog-ur like Creb, with what amount to psionic powers, can make it conscious. This requires two huge trade-offs ([[Gender
* [[Genius Cripple]]: Creb has one eye and one arm, walks with a limp, and can't hunt, so technically he's not even a man. But he's the most spiritually powerful mog-ur (religious leader, "shaman") of the whole Clan, brilliant and capable of insights most Neanderthals can't figure out.
* [[Genre Busting]]: Romance x Historical Fiction x Historical Fantasy x Travelogue x Ecology Essay
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* [[Heartwarming Orphan]]: Rydag, a half-Clan/half-Other boy who is adopted by Nezzie, the mate of the headman of the Mamutoi's Lion Camp. He's even sickly (a weak heart), but after Ayla teaches him the Clan's sign language, the rest of Lion Camp learn it to varying degrees so that they can communicate with him. When {{spoiler|he dies of heart failure}} toward the end of ''The Mammoth Hunters'', most of the Lion Camp are {{spoiler|devastated (and even some readers get a little teary-eyed.)}}
* [[History Marches On]]:
** The idea of [[The Clan]] using sign language was based on a theory that Neanderthal vocal cords were constructed in a way that limited the range of sounds they could verbalize. Specifically, there was no evidence that they had a [
** Neanderthals are portrayed as almost universally dark-haired while Cro-Magnons show all the phenotypes found in modern (mostly European) humans. Recent studies in neanderthal mDNA have shown that at least some of them were red-haired.
** The technology and cultures of the Others are a mixture of several different distinct Late Pleistocene material cultures, now known to have been separated by multi-millennial gaps in time.
* [[Hot for Student]]: When a boy of the Others becomes a man (by making a mess in his sleeping furs), he is submitted to the care of an older female for sexual mentoring (remember what we said about [[Eternal Sexual Freedom]]?). Because the female is considered to be filling a religious role, such relationships are expected to stay platonic... but Jondalar fell in love with his donii-woman and she with him. Another man, who desired said woman, spied on them planning to marry and publicized the whole thing. Jondalar punched him, there was a scandal, and Jondalar was [[Put
* [[Howl of Sorrow]]: Wolf (a tame [[Exactly What It Says
* [[Humans Are White]]: The story takes place entirely in Europe, and the characters generally have modern European coloration. Two exceptions:
** Ranec, who is half-black. His father walked from (modern-day) Ukraine to northern Africa (yes, ''walk'') before meeting his black mother's people. However, Ranec gets around sexually (like most men in this story), and many characters have observed his genetic influence on the younger generation, suggesting his skintone will not stay least-common among the Mamutoi for very long.
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* [[Language of Truth]]: Because the Clan speak in a mostly-silent sign language that incorporates body language, it is impossible for a person of the Clan (or Ayla) to lie, or be lied to: they always know you're withholding something.
* [[Littlest Cancer Patient]]: Rydag, the half-Clan Mamutoi kid from ''The Mammoth Hunters''.
* [[Looking for Love In All
* [[Love Dodecahedron]]: In the third book, it starts as a [[Love Triangle]] between Ranec, Ayla and Jondalar (who are the [[Official Couple]], so you can guess how it turns out) and then the another Mamutoi character, Vincavec, makes a bid for Ayla's attentions, but nobody [[Small Name, Big Ego|except him]] ever thinks he's a real contender. Ranec also has his ex-girlfriend Tricie who still carries a torch for him, and Jondalar has his (not present) ex-girlfriends Zolena/Zelandoni, Marona, and Serenio. It continues in the sixth book: {{spoiler|Jondalar's cheating with Marona.}}
* [[Marital Rape License]]: When men of the Clan make "the Signal," women are expected to drop everything and present for a sexual encounter. The Signal is generally done only with one's mate, but it can be given to any female if [[I'm a Man, I Can't Help It|the male's need is that pressing]]. Broud does it to Ayla only to [[Walkyverse|pound her viciously]] (he's a [[Interplay of Sex and Violence|sadistic bully]]), and Ayla is shocked to learn later that other women ''like'' sex and are not above flirting with their men. Even Clan women employ certain seductive postures and motions to give men ideas.
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* [[Nice Job Breaking It, Hero]]: Judging by Ayla's vision of the Mother {{spoiler|being forsaken for the Son}} and a number of Zelandonii men's reactions to her new verse in ''The Land of Painted Caves'', our heroine may have established the basis for future {{spoiler|patriarchies}}. She's almost certainly bringing an end to {{spoiler|[[Eternal Sexual Freedom]]}} amongst the Zelandonii, and later, other groups, with her concept of fatherhood. Those Who Worship the Great Earth Mother will probably not be best pleased.
* [[No Guy Wants an Amazon]]: Played straight in the Clan since Ayla is extremely tall and hideously misshapen to their eyes, and then averted by Jondalar and most of the Others, who have no problems with Ayla's self-sufficiency. Stands to reason, too: if you live in communities of 50-100 people or so, you'd be suicidal to turn down able-bodied workers just because they happen to have tits.
* [[No Periods, Period]]: Averted.
* [[Not So Different]]:
** Every time someone of the Others tries to justify their [[Fantastic Racism]] towards the Clan with some terrible thing a Neanderthal has done (such as Broud raping Ayla), she points out that some of the Others have done the exact same things (with actual examples) and asks if that makes ''them'' dirty animals.
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* [[Poor Communication Kills]]: If it weren't for the lack of actual resultant deaths, ''The Mammoth Hunters'' could be subtitled ''[[Poor Communication Kills]]: the Novel.'' Ayla may have learned to speak Mamutoi and Zelandonii, but she and Jondalar still spend the entire book perpetually miscommunicating and misinterpreting each other. Part of the problem is that their unspoken cultural assumptions are totally incompatible; the other half of the problem is Jondalar's numerous silly hang-ups, unwillingness to just tell Ayla he's jealous, and rather low self-confidence. This trope nearly breaks them apart permanently before the Mamutoi finally talk sense into Ayla.
* [[Power Trio]]: Siblings Brun (the clan leader), Creb (the mog-ur/shaman) and Iza (the medicine woman). They're also the tops in their respective fields among all the local clans.
* [[Purple Prose]]: Particularly in regards to the sex, occasionally leading to [[Erection Rejection]]. Wanders into [[Call a Rabbit
* [[Psychic Dreams for Everyone]]: Or at least Ayla, Jondalar, Mamut, and Shamud.
* [[Raised
* [[Rape
* [[Rape
** For a short period of time in the first book, Ayla is raped by Broud, the son and heir-designate of the clan's leader. Since he gave her the Signal, the women of the clan can't figure out why Ayla objects, whereas Ayla knows he does it to humiliate her. And indeed, Broud loses interest when she stops resisting {{spoiler|because she got pregnant by him}}.
** Later, a band of ruffians rapes an adolescent girl, who had ''not'' gone through the ritual deflowering ceremony and now refuses to have sex. Though [[Fridge Brilliance|Auel doesn't mention it]], this brings up a possible reason for ''why'' a culture would guarantee girls have a magical first time: any woman who ''can'' have children will be willing to try, which is nice for population growth (or at least maintaining a population with realistic prehistoric mortality rates.)
* [[Retroactive Precognition]]: Ayla, particularly in her speculation about whether sex causes pregnancy. (She hasn't figured it out completely, but every reader knows [[Writer
* [[Revenge Against Men]]: Attora in ''The Plains of Passage'' doesn't like her man, so she kills him, makes all the women-folk give up their men too, and locks them in a cage.
* [[Runaway Bride]]: Ayla decides, on the day of her planned Matrimonial ceremony to Ranec, to go back to Jondalar and journey to his people.
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* [[Suffer the Slings]]
* [[Thank Your Prey]]
* [[That Old Time Prescription]]: It's mentioned that practically everybody knows about willow bark tea, even non-healers.
* [[Troubled but Cute]]: Aside from having the wrong physical description (6'6, broad-shouldered, blond & blue) Jondalar fits this trope.
* [[Unlucky Childhood Friend]]: Joplaya. Maybe just as well, considering that, while she and Jondalar are only considered 'hearth cousins' by the overall culture of the Others, the readers know that [[Incest Is Relative|she and Jondalar are half-siblings who share a father.]]
* [[Victory
* [[Wandering Minstrel]]
* [[Wanton Cruelty to
* [[What Measure Is a Non-Human?]]: When Durc the [[Half-Human Hybrid]] was born, the Clan leader attempted to expose him because he was "deformed;" another Clan woman who bore a hybrid (she was raped by one of the Others) was demoted to the bottom of the pecking order. The Others rarely tolerate halfbreeds, calling them "abominations" and consider them ritually filthy -- and don't even get started about how they treat [[Double Standard|the women who bore them]].
* [[When She Smiles]]: Jetamio.
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{{reflist}}
{{The Big Read}}
[[Category:Historical Fiction Literature]]
[[Category:Romance Novel]]
[[Category:The Eighties]]
▲[[Category:Earths Children]]
[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Literature of the 1980s]]
[[Category:Literature of the 1990s]]
[[Category:Literature of the 2000s]]
[[Category:Literature of the 2010s]]
[[Category:The Great American Read]]
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