Oh jebus, me too. What a way to wake up. 
I’ve actually enjoyed the series but am a bit reluctant to read the new sequel due to all the hate even from people who liked the earlier books. Does anyone actually like it? If so, then I missed that above.
I also am reading the first book for the first time a little because of this thread (my college roommate said she learned all about sex from The Valley of the Horses as a child) and good god, what a clunky damned book. I got it from the library, thank goodness. I’m sort of continuing to read it and sort of rereading a not-amazing Barbara Hambly book that I read as a teenager and thinking “how exactly did one of these authors become a multibazillionaire for this her “best” book and the other not?”
For the neandertals to be brown-eyed is a reasonable supposition. Without intending anything racist, it’s for the same reason that (pure) Africans have brown eyes; that mutation is not in their genetic lineage. The mutation for blue eyes arose in Europe around twenty thousand years ago - long after the neandertals were only a folk memory fossilized in myth and legend.
Blond hair similarly, although it may be interrelated with skin color
As to fair skin, you have a point. Skin color is related to the balance point between vitamin A destruction and vitamin D production by UV, and tracks with light levels in native populations, overriding genetic ancestry.
Ummm … deceased, I seem to recall. The sixth book had a different editor.
There was also an oopsie in her research for “Painted Caves.”
At one point, she mentions triticale growing in a patch of grasses. :smack: Triticale is a completely artificial hybrid of wheat (Triticum) and rye (Secale). It required the crossing of polyploid strains of each grain to create a viable, reproducing plant.
Ironic, considering the first three words of Clan of the Cave Bear are “The naked child…” referring to Ayla.
I’ve listened to audiobooks before and they edit out some stuff for brevity. I can’t imagine someone reading those pages and pages and pages of how to do flint knapping for audiobook purposes. Maybe listening to the audiobook is an improvement.
I listened to a radio interview once with Jean Auel a couple of sequels back. Said she’d actually received mail from a death-row inmate at one point asking when the next installment was coming out, because he wanted to read it but was worried he didn’t have much time left.
hehehe (wheezes) thanks gang! Now I need not write the entirely scathing review of the series I had intended! 
bows to Valderon
Seriously folks, I waited for #6 in paperback so I wouldn’t have to waste too much money finding out How the Story Ends… 
and upon reading it, I rejoiced that I shall be lending my copy to at least three other people!
Brilliant! Using my newest invention Polytrope Plot Generator™, I’ve created some additional padding:
Or has this been done already?
I’m glad I’m not the only one who has noticed the large number of comma splices in Auel’s later books. (I’ve read the first five books, and The Shelters of Stone is so filled with comma splices that there’s about one per page. The other books weren’t so rife with them.)
(A comma splice is when a comma is used when a period, semicolon, or dash would be more appropriate.)
DUH!
Obviously, Ayla invented hybridization of grains!
~VOW
Sorry to revive this but it’s relatively recent.
I’m surprised she hasn’t invented farming yet. Or did she in the latest book? I’m afraid to buy it but I feel I need closure even if it will suck.
To the people who have just started the first book and think the expositions of how to do this or that are long winded… just you wait. (If you continue, that is. It gets worse. Must worse.)
I actually enjoyed the expositions in the first book. They seemed relevant and interesting, and got me personally very interested in herbology, hunting, and archeology.
Later books it just becomes TEDIOUS, especially when it’s the fifth detailed description of flint knapping in the fifth book to feature it. Seriously, it’s been done to death, lady, give it a rest.
This is all disheartening, as I actually bought the latest one a couple of weeks ago and still have it sitting on my shelf.
No, Ayla didn’t invent farming. I don’t care it that’s a spoiler. But she did have a vision of the future.
Don’t buy the book. Get it from the library if you are compelled to read it. This sixth booked sucked. And I speak as an unabashed fan of the series as a whole, tedious and long winded though some things were.
Here was my thread:
Do you still have the receipt?
To Siam Sam:
Be prepared to BARF over the repetition of “The Mother’s Song.”
I’m retching just thinking about it!
~VOW
The first book’s expositions fascinated me too. But after the fourth or so book (the first 3 were the best) I got tired of it. I also got interested in herbology (which helped me in a Psych episode when they were talking about digitalis, but otherwise, not so much). I was like “ooh Foxglove! That’ll kill ya!” And impressed Mister Vigilante.
But if I have to read ONE MORE SONG… I don’t want to read it.
So does she become the Zelandoni or what? You can spoiler it. I’ll still read it. The spoiler I mean.