The Clan of the Cave Bear

Title: The Clan of the Cave Bear

Series: Earth's Children - book 1

Author: Jean M. Auel

Rating: 4 stars

Genre: Historical Fiction

Number of Pages: 502

Publication Date: 1980

Publisher: Hodder

TBR Challenge: Read a book that was recommended to you

Summary (from the back of the book): Orphaned by an earthquake at the age of five, Ayla is left without a family or people. Until she is adopted by the Clan, a group of Neanderthal. Ayla inspires first surprise, then wariness and finally acceptance by the Clan. She is cared for by its medicine women Iza and its wise holy man Creb. Only their future leader, Broud, is not willing to accept this strange women. Consumed with hatred, he does all he can to destroy her. But Ayla bears the marks and the spirit of her totem, the Cave Lion. She is a survivor.

I used to see this book series in the library all the time but never picked it up. However, in my second year of university, one of my lecturers mentioned how the Earth's Children was one of her favourite book series. When I realised that the books I kept seeing everywhere were the same as the one's she had recommended, I figured I should probably pick up The Clan of the Cave Bear and give them ago. I was pretty excited when I got my TBR challenge this month because it gave me an excuse to move this book up to the top of my TBR pile.

This book did take a while to get into. One of the things that I struggled with was the way that the characters communicated. Rather than speaking with words to one another, the Clan (aka the Neanderthals) talk in a series of hand gestures and a few spoken words to help emphasis certain points. To portray this as well as what she did, would have been no small feat and shows just how incredible a writer Jean is. It does, however, take a while to wrap your head around, especially in the beginning but soon you find yourself getting use to reading someone gesturing a sentence as opposed to speaking it.

In line with this idea of a different communication style was the incredibly different cultural portrayals that Jean created. For example, because the Clan speaks with hand gestures, it is considered rude to look at others, especially when they are 'speaking', much in the same way that we consider eavesdropping to be rude. But I really enjoyed learning these social customs of the Clan through Ayla, who as an outsider or other, struggles to learn the new social customs. This was particularly obvious in how the Clan originally viewed Ayla's smiles as signs of hostility which they saw as bearing her teeth, like an angry animal would and Ayla crying when she was overly emotional which they saw as her having weak eyes.

Jean also created interesting parallels between the Clan and the Others. In particular the idea that the Neanderthal relied on memory and as a result were a stagnant people, unable to let go of their traditions and move forward, never creating. While Ayla's people, the Other, were forward thinkers, able to create and think ahead, as opposed to constantly seeing the past. Yet despite creating this parallel, at no point did she ever diminish the Neanderthal by giving them an unjust stereotypical unintelligent persona.

Through doing an archaeology degree I have both indirectly and directly looked at human evolution and I am amazed at the world Jean created 30 odd years ago. A lot of the ideas that Jean has presented in this book surrounding Neanderthal are ideas that have only recently been accepted as true. Sure there are some points that are questionable, but considering when The Clan of the Cave Bear was published, Jean must have done a lot of research.