Indeed. This is Jean Auel when she was in her early twenties; very much like the description of Ayla in the books.
And here she is at the age when she wrote the last parts. She looks a lot like her description of Zelandoni.
Yup. I read that one in translation.
That whole tribe of the Crazy Woman was such a waste of what could have, to my younger mind, been done so much better. Here you have a tribe that worships wolves. And Ayla HAS A PET WOLF THAT FOLLOWS HER EVERY COMMAND. Yet they dragged it over pages and pages. Just bring the wolf out of hiding and lay some smackdown. Sheesh.
Also, she invented sewing live tissue together in general. No one had ever done it except to sew clothing.
Oh, totally. I think it went on for chapters and chapters, didn’t it? Also, don’t forget that she domesticated animals. Also, she said that it was A-OK to put people’s faces on figurines, leading, eventually, to the Mona Lisa and other works of art.
Tribe of the Crazy Woman also invented firing pottery, but that was glossed over so as to become inconsequential. If AYLA had discovered the “rocks that burn” and had fired her own pottery, it would have been handled differently.
Ayla also took credit for inventing soap.
~VOW
In Auel’s defense, much of how she described Neanderthals was speculative at the time because so little was known about them. There was no DNA analysis; the hyoid bone (as Colibri pointed out) had not been discovered, and its shape would determine whether Neanderthals were capable of articulate speech. What we knew at the time was that Neanderthals had a larger brain capacity than us, a larger occipital lobe, had the same injury rate as rodeo clowns, left behind no evidence of art, died younger than Cro-Magnon, and stopped showing up in the fossil record shortly after Cro-Magnon appeared.
What we know now, thanks to DNA analysis, that there must have been interbreeding, because anywhere from 1-4% of non-African Cro-Magnon DNA derives from the Neanderthal genome. We know that at least some Neanderthal were pale, freckled, and even had red hair - a different genetic mutation from what created red hair in Cro-Magnon DNA. Now that a hyoid bone has been recovered and found to be virtually identical to our own, paleontologists make language the default assumption. They also have the same copy of one of the genes we know contributes to speech in humans. They may have made jewelry and marked their belongings for some aesthetic reason, they very likely marked their bodies with ochre and manganese, and they probably did build permanent shelters out of mammoth skulls.
Using gestures for communications? Completely believable. After all, bonobos and gorillas do it.
Possessing language skills? Well, Neanderthals had enough space in their skulls to put abstract thought into an externalized form. Not a wild grab.
A language completely based on gesture? Erm, a lot less plausible, but understandable given Auel’s needs for a story that wasn’t going to turn into Ayla of the slightly-more-evolved-than-apes Neanderthal.
Racial memory? Total and complete bupkus, especially if you stop to consider that if it were even plausible, the memories transmitted could only go up to the moment of the next zygote’s conception.
I don’t believe her depiction of Neanderthals as dark haired and dark eyed is necessarily racist. After all, the Inuit live above the Arctic circle, and they’re entirely dark haired and dark eyed. Yes, inevitably a population will select towards less expression of melanin in a polar region, but that means light brown eyes, not blue eyes. Blue eyes require a specific, random genetic mutation. That mutation isn’t inevitable, and it doesn’t show up in Cro-Magnon until 18,000 years ago. There’s no current evidence that the mutation ever occurred in Neanderthals.
All that being said, everything after the third book is crap.
The Inuit are relatively recent arrivals above the Arctic circle in evolutionary terms, and they learned to make up for the snow-blindness vulnerability caused by their dark brown eyes through the use of Inuit sun goggles http://ethnology.wordpress.com/category/north-american-tribescultures/arctic/inuit/
As you can see from the picture (scroll down on that page) these are goggles made of ivory or wood, covering most of the eyes except for two small slits.
Since snow blindness can be a virtual death sentence for a hunter who is out alone, the forces selecting for less melanin in the bodies of an arctic population would be strong indeed. But the invention of these sunglasses (coupled with the fact that Inuit are not that darkskinned, so that Vitamin D absorption is not a problem) could easily moderate the natural selection process to less melanin among the Inuit.
If the blue-eyed mutation did not show up in Cro-Magnons until 18,000 years ago, then what are we to make of the Cro-Magnons in Auel’s books, which by her own admission are set in a period between 25,000 and 30,000 years ago. It would seem that Ayla, Jondalar and every other Cro-Magnon in her books has “glacier-blue” eyes. Indeed, at one point in the fifth or sixth book, a character says that Neanderthals cannot be human since he has NEVER seen a human with brown eyes.
So is Auel sompletyely off the mark with all her blue-eyed Cro-Magnons 35,000 years ago?
Hey, if Snooki can get her some face-to-face action, I’m sure your average Neanderthaless could, too!
I guess what bothers me is the subtly racist assumption that modern=fairer. I don’t know if I can link properly to the picture here http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/10/28/article-1324243-0BCB8805000005DC-203_468x286.jpg but I think you know the kind of illustration I mean. It shows the assumed chain of evolution going from an ape-like creature (who is almost always quite black) on the left through progressively lighter but still “coloured” near-humans until finally, on the far right side of the illustration, we see a fully modern human who is inevitably white with light-brown or blond hair. Why not show a black man or an Asian at the end of the chain? Are they not modern humans as well?
More more more!!!
Well, there is :
The Author’s Song
*Out of the eighties, the chaos of publishing
Pulp fiction was like wet diarrhea forth gushing
Jean woke to herself knowing cash had great worth
So she wrote her first book about Children of Earth
*
I thought that Inuit got their vitamin D from their heavy seafood/pinniped diet, so that they did not need to evolve lighter skins. (This is information that is tucked away in my brain without a source, so it could easily be wrong.)
The Inuit are themselves descendants of a population that evolved lighter skin. This apparently happened twice, and with slightly different genes involved-- the ancestor of Europeans and the ancestors of East Asians. Eye and hair color are separate issues.
The Author’s Song
Out of the eighties, the chaos of publishing
Pulp fiction like wet diarrhea forth gushing
Jean woke to herself knowing cash had great worth
So she wrote her first book about Children of Earth
But “Cave Bear” was lonely, it was the only.
So she wrote four more books like her publisher asked
And when she had finished her mothering task
She had tomes about cave-men and Neanderthal bums
And all kinds of primates with opposable thumbs
The royalties were flowing, the authoress growing.
With Ayla the perfect and Jondalar the Hung
The god-like Cro-Magnons of which legends are sung
The travelling lovers could pause for a while
And then get their rocks off in true stone-age style.
But five books wouldn't do, she was writing anew.
So the authoress brought forth a sixth volume of lore
In the same writing style as five others before
With details aplenty and so much repetition
That when she had finished her profitable mission
The readers, aghast, said “Thank God it’s the last”.
Oh, I think I hurt myself from laughing…
~VOW
Yes, true, but you’re missing the point that a person doesn’t have to be blue-eyed to have light colored eyes. Case in point. Even then, snowblindness is caused by UV burns to the cornea. I don’t know about you, but I keep my irises beneath my cornea. Therefore, the color of the iris has no protective power for the cornea.
Yes, yes, she is. However, the mutation wasn’t discovered until 2008, so cut the woman a little slack. Also, I need to correct myself. The Wikipedia article on eye color states that the single ancestor possessing the genetic mutation which made blue eyes possible lived between 6,00-10,000 years ago, not 18,000, and probably somewhere around modern day Romania.
Which actually makes for a twist on the original set up: had a tribe of Neanderthals adopted an orphaned Cro-Magnon girl, she might have been the only one with brown eyes in the entire group. 
It also means that there was some serious inbreeding among my long-ago ancestors, if blue eyes got passed around as much as they did.
You’re telling me! Since blue eyes are a recessive gene, and since they are now extremely common among Caucasians especially in northern Europe, and not uncommon around the north side of the Mediterranean, the descendants of that one blue-eyed mutation must *really *have enjoyed games the whole family can play!
Speaking of which, I am reminded of a Lebanese who told me that there are entire villages of blue-eyed people in the Lebanese countryside. Whenever he comes across one, he asks if there is a ruin of a crusaders’ castle nearby , and 9 out of 10 times there is. I guess those poor guys had to do something while fighting to liberate the Holy Land from the heathen Saracen!
I’m with John. I made it through the first book just barely, and have never been interested in the rest. I don’t know enough to judge the view of cave life, but I couldn’t help thinking about the storage requirements for racial memory - and figured that the Neanderthals’ heads would have exploded.
And another cheer for Valteron’s version. I have a title - Naked Came the Cave Girl.
Also, A Christmas Carol?
It happens that I am reading (well, book-on-taping) Clan of the Cave Bear for the first time right now. (I’m at the part where Ayla is “dead.”) Since a lot of comments seem to be of the “the first book / the first couple books were alright” variety, I thought I’d throw in my two cents as a new reader… Even the first book is not particularly well-written! The hallmarks of the writing style are right there in the first book, the methodical explanations, the repeated explanations of what has happened, and the detailed lists of all the flora and fauna that might be around a particular location (that one especially puts me into snooze mode).
What gets me most of all is how everything seems to go right all the time. At this point in the story I’ve interpreted much of Ayla’s advantages to her just being different, but things just go on and on and on before the shit finally hits the fan and something bad happens. I’ve become accustomed to much more efficient stories, and anyone saying a thing like “I hope I don’t give birth to a boy” or “I sure hope they don’t catch me with this sling,” is a sure-fire indicator that we’re going to see those consequences sooner rather than later.
Ayla already feels to me like a Mary Sue, but for the purpose of world-exploration/building, that isn’t really so awful, at least not at this point in the series. It’s not great writing, but it is entertaining, especially on a daily commute. I think if I were actually reading it I’d find these elements a lot more annoying. I’m enjoying it but from what I’ve read about the other books I don’t think I’ll be checking them out, and I decided that before I even came across all the snark going in this thread! 
Well, as for the excessive explanations and descriptions of wildlife, if you were reading the book to yourself you’d have the option of skimming over them. With an audiobook you’re forced to listen to every word.
