Earth's Children is a series of epic historical fiction (or more precisely, prehistorical fiction) novels written by Jean M. Auel set circa 30,000 years before the present day. There are six novels in the series. Although Auel had previously mentioned in interviews that there would be a seventh novel, publicity announcements for the sixth confirmed that it would be the final book in the sequence.
The series is set in Europe during the Upper Paleolithic era, after the date of the first ceramics discovered, but before the last advance of glaciers. The books focus on the period of co-existence between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals.
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. It tells the story of Ayla, an orphaned Cro-Magnon girl who is adopted and raised by a tribe of Neanderthals who call themselves "the Clan". In early adulthood, she is given a "death curse," by the new leader who hates her. She is forced to leave behind her toddler son, a Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon mix, in search of people like her. She spends years living alone in a cave as she searches for the Cro-Magnon people she has been told live north of the peninsula on which she was raised, who are called "the Others" by the Neanderthals. Along the way she meets her romantic interest and supporting co-protagonist, Jondalar.
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. In the third and fourth works, they meet various groups of Cro-Magnons and encounter their culture and technology. The couple finally return to Jondalar's people in the fifth novel. 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.
In addition, Auel's series incorporates a number of recent archeological and anthropological theories. It also suggested the notion of Sapiens-Neanderthal interbreeding.
The author's treatment of unconventional sexual practices (which are central to her hypothesized nature-centered religions) and frequent explicit depictions of sex has earned the series a top twenty place on the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–1999.
Books
The Clan of the Cave Bear
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. It introduces the reader to a wide variety of diverse topics, including herbal medicine and anthropological-archeological reasoning. The book introduces Ayla, a young girl belonging to the titular clan who looks nothing like her peers, especially with her long, golden hair.
The Valley of Horses
The Valley of Horses was released in September 1982. Ayla, cast out of the Clan, has been forced to follow the advice given her in the first book by her dying foster-mother Iza. 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.
The Mammoth Hunters
The third book in the series, The Mammoth Hunters, was released in fall 1985. 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.
The Plains of Passage
The Plains of Passage was released in November 1990. Ayla and Jondalar travel west, back to Zelandonii territory, encountering dangers from both nature and humans along the way. Her interactions often force the people around her to take a broader view and be more accepting of new ideas.
The Shelters of Stone
The Shelters of Stone was released on 30 April 2002. Ayla and Jondalar reach the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii, Jondalar's home, and prepare to marry and have a child. Unfortunately, nothing is ever simple, especially for a woman with Ayla's background.
The Land of Painted Caves
The Land of Painted Caves, the sixth and final installment in the series, was published on March 29, 2011. 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.
Premise
Since the stories take place during the Würm glaciation, populations are small in number and are surviving mostly in hunter-gatherer fashion. Prior to the discovery of metals, the primary materials used for tools are leather, wood, bone, horn, and flint.
People
In Auel's series, two cultures vie for resources, space, and survival: the Clan, which is what Neanderthals call themselves, and the Cro-Magnons (whom Ayla, with her Clan upbringing, generally refers to as "The Others"). 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.
Physiologically, the Clan are heavier and broader but also shorter than the people of The Others. They are very slow to embrace change and to innovate, and they still chase after animals to spear them directly, whereas the Cro-Magnons are enthusiastic about innovation and have moved on to projectile spears. The Clan's tools, clothing, and household implements are similarly less refined and sometimes less effective than those of their Cro-Magnon counterparts, whose implements and other goods are more technologically sophisticated.
The Clan's reluctance to change is depicted by Auel as a function of their cognition; they are presented as dependent upon their racial-genetic memory. The average Clan child needs only be 'reminded' of a thing to know it permanently, though skilled tasks still require repetitive practice. 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.
The "Flatheads", as "The Others" pejoratively call the Neanderthals (owing to their distinctive back-sloping foreheads), also have a far more limited vocal repertoire than The Others, and largely communicate instead via a gestural sign language, although spoken words are sometimes used to add emphasis to the gestures. Auel describes this language as being quite nuanced, especially as bodily posture, facial expression and other physical actions — in short, body language — can expedite and expand upon the basic vocabulary of the hand signals. A Cro-Magnon observing Ayla demonstrating a translation characterizes the language as dancelike and elegant.
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. However, a Clan member can "refrain from mentioning" something she would prefer other people did not know, even though residual clues would probably reveal that something was being concealed. 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.
Finally, the wider Clan possesses not only a colloquial, everyday "localized" language, but also a more formal "ancient" or "spirit language," used to converse with ancestors and understood by every Clan member, anywhere. This language facilitates easy communication at inter-regional meetings of normally separated groups and does not require the multilingualism that the Others must acquire. This "spirit language" has no spoken words apart from personal names, and its users generally refer to themselves in the third person.
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). The Clan, for their part, seem to have no strong opinions about the Others other than considering their spoken language as babbling and a sign of their lack of intellect. Otherwise, they have concluded it is best simply to avoid the Cro-Magnon men.
Accurate to current DNA evidence, Auel depicts Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals as able to interbreed. The mixed-race children are generally not favorably regarded by either group. As in many historical cultures, malformed Clan children are routinely subjected to exposure, while the Others may allow such children to live but prejudicially label them as 'abominations'. Such children and their experiences enter the plotline in several books of the series.
"Children of mixed spirits", as the Cro-Magnons call them, are mis-matched combinations of both Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal phenotypes physiologically as they are genetic hybrids, with some traits (like facial features) appearing blurred or distorted when compared side-by-side. Of the five mixed-race people depicted in the series, only one has had the restricted vocal range of the Clan (Rydag, from The Mammoth Hunters), and all but one has been seen using Clan sign language, the sole exception being the difficult and disconsolate self-loathing Brukeval (who is in clear psychological denial about his ancestry), in The Shelters of Stone. The vocal range of one of the mixed-race persons is as of yet unknown because she was only a baby when we meet her in The Clan of the Cave Bear.
Organization
"The Clan" is an overarching term; every Neanderthal is a member of the Clan. Organizationally, they live in smaller tribes, also called "clans" but named after the man who leads them; for instance, Ayla is adopted into Brun's clan. Later, when Brun steps down and, as is traditional, passes leadership of the clan on to the son of his mate, it becomes known as Broud's clan. Every seven years, Clans from the immediate area meet in a Clan Gathering; the only one Auel has depicted consisted of approximately 250 people. The Clan is mostly patriarchal: women cannot hunt, make hunting tools, lead a Clan or become a Mog-ur (a spiritual leader or shaman). But men cannot become medicine women, a job that is almost as prestigious as clan leader. Unlike other women, whose status depends on the status of their mates, a medicine woman has status in her own right and can, if her line is illustrious enough, even outrank the leader's mate.