Earth's Children
Although Auel had previously mentioned in interviews that there would be a seventh novel,[4] publicity announcements for the sixth confirmed it would be the final book in the sequence.
As a whole, the series is a tale of personal discovery: coming-of-age, invention, cultural complexities, and, beginning with the second book, explicit romantic sex.
The story arc in part comprises a travel tale, in which the two lovers journey from the region of what will be Ukraine to Jondalar's home in what is now France, along an indirect route up the Danube River valley.
The series includes a highly detailed focus on botany, herbology and herbal medicine, archaeology, and anthropology, but it also features substantial amounts of romance, coming-of-age crises, and—employing significant literary license—the attribution of certain advances and inventions to the protagonists.
[5] The first book, The Clan of the Cave Bear, was released in September 1980 and is a story of personal development set in pre-historic southern Europe during the current ice age but before the last glacial maximum.
She goes in search of the Others—that is, people like herself: European Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens, or early-modern humans, returned west and north to Europe after an incubation period of tens of millennia in the Near and Far East.
It details Ayla's personal growth as she learns to cope with a society of widely disparate individuals and their unpredictable behaviors, mysterious motivations, and habits.
Ayla and Jondalar travel west, back to Zelandonii territory, encountering dangers from both nature and humans along the way.
[6] Author Jean M. Auel is quoted in September 2010 saying that in this book, Ayla is about 25 years old and training to become a spiritual leader of the Zelandonii which includes a series of harrowing journeys.
The races are fairly different in culture, society and technology, but with some overlap: both depend on flint for their tools; both recognize the importance of fire and use it; both hunt and gather.
Furthermore, the need to encode everything into a child's brain has increased the average Neanderthal head size to the point that, by the time of the first novel, women of the Clan are having trouble giving birth to their large-headed babies—a sign that their evolutionary strategy has run its course.
For this reason, Clan members are highly adept at reading body language and cannot be deceived by lying; while one can spell an untruth with one's hands, one's posture will give it away.
Consequently, the idea of telling an untruth is alien to Clan culture, a fact that Ayla needs time to conceptualize and understand.
Cultural conventions, Auel suggests, would cause other Clan members to ignore the concealment out of sheer courtesy, though, again, Ayla has trouble grasping this concept.
In Auel's context, our human ancestors, the Cro-Magnon "Others," generally look upon the "Flatheads" as animals, hardly better than bears (the lack of vocal language is a primary factor in this verdict).
Their culture is far more egalitarian, with different twists and customs at every hand; Mamutoi Camps, for instance, are co-ruled by headmen and headwomen who are biological, or adoptive, siblings, and the Sharamudoi, a people that lives half-on and -off the Great Mother River, form complex co-mate systems between river couples (Ramudoi) and land couples (Shamudoi).
Each entire people generally gathers for Summer Meetings every year, during which a number of important ceremonies, such as the Matrimonial, take place.
In the ancient days when the weather spirits were honored, roles within the Clan had not yet become so markedly differentiated by sex—for example, women still hunted alongside the men when they didn't have little children who needed their care.
The Great Earth Mother goes by many names, depending on the language, but is worshipped unconditionally as the source of all bounty, and carved depictions of her proliferate.
While neither Clan nor Other society requires monogamy, a major difference is that in the former, sex can be treated as a purely physical need, whereas in the latter, it is always imbued with something of the sacred.
Among the Clan, there exists a hand sign that only men can make and only women can receive, instructing the female in question to present for sexual intercourse.
(The female's state of arousal is never addressed directly, but since Clan women are able to flirt with men using seductive and inviting body language, enjoyment of the act is not unknown.)
Because the Clan believes babies are created by the Totems and have no concept of any connection between copulation and conception, lines of descent are matrilineal, but any children a man's mate bears are considered his heirs (especially in regards to the son of the leader's mate becoming the future leader), and he is expected to provide for her family and train her sons to hunt.
Who is mated to whom is decided solely by the men, though wise leaders do of course take the prospective bride's feelings into account; the few Clans depicted average less than fifty members, and even one discordant pairing can cause trouble.
Young women who have reached menarche, on the other hand, are the subject of a far more formal ceremony called First Rites, in which she is ritually deflowered by a man (often specially chosen by her friends and family).
Finally, during "Mother Festivals" which take place at various times of the year, men and women are free to copulate with whomever they choose.
Ayla's more accurate belief that children are the result of sexual activity is treated with skepticism among the Others: their women are seldom celibate, which makes the connection between sex and pregnancy harder to isolate.
