Once upon a time on Twitter, a discussion broke out about Jean M. Auel and the Earth’s Children’s series, her long (very long) (oh so long) series about the adventures of Ayla, a prehistoric woman who invented basically everything and her arm candy Jondalar as they trek across Ice Age Europe 30,000 years ago and accidentally invent the patriarchy (along with basically everything else).
For a lot of us, this was an early experience with books that involved peen and sex and a LOT OF SEX. I remember a disturbing amount of details of what events happened in which book, who was who, and precisely which book involved Ayla and Jondalar getting down and getting busy with a bit of role play after watching mammoths mating. (It’s Plains of Passage, by the way.)
For anyone who missed the true heyday of the Earth’s Children series (and oh, HOW MUCH YOU MISSED), it started with Clan of the Cave Bear, published in 1980. CotCB is about a group of Neanderthals who find a Cro-Magnon toddler, Ayla, and raise her. There’s a LOT of herbal medicine and discussion about how to use a sling to hunt and make things out of flint and how food is gathered and preserved. It’s also pretty rapey in parts – the Neanderthal society is extremely male-dominated and the son of the leader of the group hates Ayla, so he uses rape (what we would call rape, they don’t have any concept of it) to dominate her.
Anyway, things go badly, she’s exiled, and ends up in the next book living alone in a valley somewhat north of the Black Sea for years where she domesticates a horse and a lion (kind of) and discovers that you can use flint to start a fire. At the same time, Jondalar, the series hero (kind of) starts a journey from what will be France along the Danube river, ending up in Ayla’s valley. They meet and fall in love, meet a bunch of other people, go back to Jondalar’s home in France, and Ayla becomes a religious-leader shaman-type person. (I know this is the barest bones summary you can imagine, but there are six books and they’re all 500 pages long. So much happens, and it happens a lot.)
What these books introduced to me was
a) sexytimes in books
b) pages upon pages of meticulous research
c) CRAZYSAUCE UP THE WAZOO
Ayla is the Mary Sue GreatGrandmother of us all. She’s blonde and gorgeous and “exotic looking” and can do everything anyone can do but BETTER. She’s stronger and smarter and can diagnose illnesses that no one has ever heard of, she can learn languages faster than anyone else ever, makes the best flint tools, leather, baskets, food, and weapons, can use a sling better than you, and AND if anyone meets her and doesn’t immediately love her, they are a bad person.
She also invented the needle, the atlatl, digitalis, animal domestication, the travois, the bra, and surgical stitches. She did not invent soap – that was somebody else they met in Germany or something – but she probably made it better and scented. With moisturizer. She did figure out the connection between sex and babies, and then, because sex creates babies, the men got all worked up over paternity, thus inventing the patriarchy.
Jondalar is the earliest hero (in terms of when his story takes place, not in terms of publication date) having a Magic Peen, as Kat from BookThingo pointed out. See, all of the cultures they come across, all of them have this concept of “First Rites” where a young woman has ritualized sex for her first time, with an experienced man, and an emphasis placed on her pleasure and safety. Jondalar is VERY good at this ritual, except that his penis is large, so he needs to be careful. (It’s a real problem for him, guys.) He’s the best at sex in the whole of Eurasia. There’s been extensive testing.
Look, there’s a lot of ridiculousness, and the last three books (Plains of Passage, 1990, The Shelters of Stone, 2002, and The Land of Painted Caves, 2011) have a lot of storytelling problems. They tend to be very repetitive as Ayla meets new people (who all notice, in order, that she’s impossibly beautiful and has a slight speech impediment), and the descriptions border on mind-numbing.
But, as the twitter conversation that inspired this post ranged on, there were things that we remembered with great fondness. There’s a completely unremarked on interracial relationship between Ayla and another dude in The Mammoth Hunters ( A | BN | K | G | AB ) (and it’s outright stated that there are a number of people who make journeys to far off places and come back with partners from the Far East and Africa, and no one is perturbed by people of different races). There’s an explicit discussion of consent between Ayla, who had no concept of it, and her mentor. The idea that she gets to decide who she has sex with is a revelation to her, and it was important for a lot of the audience as well.
The whole concept of sex in the Cro-Magnon societies is based completely on pleasure and honoring the deity of the Great Earth Mother. Because they didn’t know that sex resulted in babies, the only reason to have it is because it feels good, and emphasis is placed on the pleasure aspect for everyone involved. Having that concept in some of my formative reading material was huge.
The other thing that was so formative for me was the amount of research and detail Auel crammed in. I have a reasonable basis for understanding herbal medicine because of these book (not purely because of these books – they made me interested enough to read more). She talks about how to knap flint tools, and prepare leather. Auel did so much work to base the world in what was accepted theory at the time. (There was a theory that Neanderthals could not speak because no one found a hyoid bone in a Neanderthal dig until 1989), so she posited that they had a sign language. This is where my desire for research started…. although in the last book she ditched plot for description in the first two thirds (of a 700 page book), so balance is good.
We talk a lot about our memories of life-changing books here, and this series was certainly one of my formative discoveries.
What about you? Did you read these? Were you as perplexed by Ayla and Jondalar role-playing that they were fucking mammoths as I was? Be honest, did you try to hunt a squirrel just to see if you could? (I did. I did do that.) (Unsuccessfully.)
Oh god yes the Mary Sue aspect. My husband asked me “was there anything Ayla couldn’t do?” And did you know, there is *one* thing that’s beyond her talents.
She can’t sing.
It doesn’t come up until “The Mammoth Hunters”, but yes, she can’t.
I read all of them, and yes, got annoyed at the description, but I think it’s influenced my own writing a lot. After all, you don’t want them doing stuff like riding dinosaurs or anything, do you?
I read at least the first 2 and I re-read book 2, where Jondalar is introduced A LOT. Especially certain scenes, ahem. I may have gotten bogged down with 3 and gave up, but I have a fondness for 2 😀
My mom read these and loved the first few, so they always had a “mom vibe” that made me stay away. We’re both romance readers (she is less so now), but I don’t think there is a romance out there we’ve both enjoyed. If I’d known about the sexy times I might have skimmed. 🙂
I do remember a friend telling them about me on field trip (I was maybe 14 and V.C. Andrews was also discussed) and not knowing the word “Mary Sue” but getting a creepy Aryan vibe from the “she’s blonde and beautiful and smarter than everyone else.”
I know Mom reread through the series a few years ago and was disappointed.
Her tastes had changed. I think she had plans to the last one, but was turned off.
I knew about the books but never read them as a teenager in the early 1990s. Is it too late? I suspect so…
Eleven years after finding the second book in my high school’s library, I can still remember Certain Scenes verbatim. It was very potent stuff!
Oh yes, I read the books. Enjoyed them, too. I may occasionally still revisit them, if I’m in the mood for that kind of crazysauce! 😉
I remember my husband asking me if she was going to invent the wheel next. I ran out of steam somewhere around book 4, but bought and read all of them. Remembering how I was drooling for book 3 to come out does give me some sympathy for the fans of ASOIAF.
My mom let me read these books when I was about 12 as long as I promised not to read the sex scenes. I totally did anyway. When I confessed later as an adult, she told me, “I knew you would. I figured you could handle it.”
Everything I know about sex I learned from Mom’s book stash.
Oh, yes. I plucked the first three off my dad’s bookshelf and devoured them. Repeatedly. But the fourth was a disappointment when it came out, and then the decade-plus wait for the fifth happened. By the time it came out, I had learned to recognize bad writing.
I was too young to be paying attention to the publishing industry, but I wonder if Outlander’s success was partly due to Auel’s enormous fan base and their hunger for more richly detailed historical stories with tons of boning.
I remember reading these books when they came out. I loved the first few. I loved how Ayla learned the things she needed to know in order to survive.You would think that a book about a person living alone with a couple of animals (the second book?) would be boring, but it was not. I think the author had health problems, and there was a big gap between most of the books and the last two. I read the second last one, and it was pretty awful so I didn’t read the last one. The first ones were great though, and I still am fond of them. Maybe a reread is in order.
What I remember most was my intro to Anthropology professor praising CotCB for the accuracy of its research. I’d read CotCB and enjoyed it, but I couldn’t get into the second one due to the obvious Mary Sue-ism, so I missed most of the good sex, alas. I was so shocked a few years later when my library director referred to it as cave man pRon.
I was given one by a high school classmate and read the first four. BY the time the last two came out, my tastes in books either changed or the new computer algorithms have changed how I choose my next read that I never read them. It is sad that she had to give her child away, though.
Oh, book 2, I remember you FONDLY. And every erotica and erotic romance author I buy should be grateful for my love of book 2.
Seriously, I loved the first two, was meh on 3-5, and was so enraged by the ending of book 6 that I hurled it against a wall. One does not want one’s [admittedly Mary Sue] superheroines devalued by patriarchal bullshit.
sadly, I didn’t read these as a teen/pre-teen. My mum loves them, so I stayed away from them just like I stayed away from Tolkien (mum loves LOTR too). I have since slogged through Tolkien and don’t regret that choice AT ALL. But I’m very sad about not having read about Ayla at a formative age. By the time I got round to it, I was already at uni, doing prehistoric archaeology, and I just couldn’t get past the glaring errors. The Neanderthals (who had adapted to life in ice-age Eurasia) were the blond ones and the Cro-magnons the dark ones (they’d left Africa more recently). Frankly, the idea that Neanderthals were dark because they were more “primitive” is incredibly racist, but sadly very pervasive.
And I love the Neanderthals! Having someone write them as rapist creeps makes me sad, okay? For a non-fiction book rec, read The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body by Steven Mithen if you want your mind blown.
I read books 1 through 3 in my early teens. Picked up the first one because I was all about archaeology and human evolution, and looooved Valley of the Horses both because Ayla seemed super awesome (hyper-competence?) and because of the sexy times.
OMG YES! I read most of these in the early 90’s after I split up with my first serious boyfriend. They were the perfect escape from my heartbroken misery. I loved Jondalar.
Such sweet memories from a point in time long gone but never forgotten. ❤️
I have a horrific memory of my GRANDFATHER reading these after me. I was in junior high (6th? 7th? grade), and loved the amount of detail in terms of history/research. I was reading book 2, and my Gramps was reading book 1, and brought up, AT THE DINNER TABLE, the rape scene(s). Asked if book 2 was more/less explicit and if there was more rape.
I wanted the earth to swallow me whole on the spot. Seriously.
But somehow I managed to answer that other than the rape in book 1, which in the length of the book isn’t until you are at least 1/2 way through it, any sex is positive and yes, explicit. But then so is her explanation of hunting with a sling and herbal medicine, so why would I expect anything to be less than explicitly explained in detail? I also threw in that I had heard that for each paragraph she wrote Jean M. Auel had at least 1 page of research because she wanted to be as accurate to the time period as possible.
I read the first 3, and I think most of the 4th, but never picked up the 5th.
I am here for the craycray. I loved these books when I was a teenager half for the sex, half for the history. But the final book. THE FINAL BOOK. I nearly hurled my Kindle against the wall and didn’t only because I valued my Kindle too much. Then I took to Goodreads and wrote an absolutely scathing review that contained this lovely turn of phrase:
I read valley of the horses first, and it fit right in with my ‘person is all alone in the wilderness and survives just fine, thanks, and isn’t it nice without any other people?’ loves (island of the blue dolphins, my side of the mountain, etc. all of which were ruined at the end by the person being forced back into society, ahem). So then I went back and read Clan, which suffered from having too many awful people in it, and tried to read Plains of Passage but the first hundred pages were all botany and mammoth sex and I just couldn’t. So I guess I missed out on mammoth-sex roleplay?
But yes, I loved her surviving on her own, and inventing things, and *thinking* about things, she’s so curious and exploratory and creative. And her sex scenes, while never really titillating, were always memorable.
I read the first five. For me, at least, it was a case where the first one was the best, and the others were pretty much repetitive until I got bored and moved on to something else. I had a similar reaction to the In Death series. It was good until it wasn’t, but I still remember the first books fondly.
I have read all but #3 (Mammoth Hunters), because I got partway in and just couldn’t with Jondalar being a douche.
I read CotCB first, probably at 10-11 years old (thanks, mom, for not taking books away from me), and then stumbled into #4 (Plains of Passage) next. Before 7th grade.
As you might imagine, when girls were talking about “Ralph” (I think?) from Blume’s Forever, I was all, “well, have you guys seen THIS?” At which point girls freaked out at Auel’s sex scenes. Heh.
I still have love for these books. Especially 1, 2, 4, & 5. I read FAST and am a pro skimmer, so a re-read now doesn’t mean every page. (I agree with the rage at book 6 and J’s idiocy). The research, the examination of societal constructs versus thinking through things as an outsider…all very cool. Still.
And the crazysauce. Yay.
OMG these were actually the first explicit books I had read. About 13ish, and after these moved to full blown romance novels, from YA romance novels. I always remember my 8th grade 50ish male biology teacher recommending these books and telling kids to read them, and me, being the only one who had read them, snickering in class because I knew how much sex was in them.
And since these were my first explicit books, I may have totally marked the pages that had sexy times, for quick reference to compare to “traditional” romance novel sexy times.
The Mammoth Hunters was always my favorite because the secondary characters, if I’m recalling what I thought correctly, were interesting. I do know I never read the last one, have it, but never read it because so many people said it was pretty bad. I usually don’t take stock in or even read reviews of things I’m interested in, but I was already at the point where I just wanted to read quicker, still descriptive, but not ridiculously descriptive, books. Maybe one day I’ll re-read them all again and actually finish the series.
The final book where we find out that the woman who never mixed anything up in her Medicine bag took the wrong herb, gave herself a miscarriage, slept with the town trashy guy and invented the patriarchy was enough to make me want to set things on fire.
Efficiently.
I still have it because there’s a part of me that hates having an incomplete set, but wow. That book broke my heart. I read through ten thousand lengthy, repetitive introductions and cave descriptions to see the invention of violent jealousy over a man owning a woman’s potential breeding capacity.
Still not over it.
When The Clan of the Cave Bear was released, I was getting my crazy sauce from Bertrice Small and my historical fiction from Roberta Gellis. I had a newly minted English degree and had written my senior paper on Chaucer. I was kicking up my heels a bit while considering grad school. My then future mother-in-law and her friends read TCotCB for their book club and discussed it at length over coffee for weeks. I read the book because of all the buzz and decided it wasn’t my historical time period. At some point, I received Valley of the Horses as a gift, because horses. All the girls at the stables were reading Book 2 and talking about the horses, but not the sexy times. Hmmm. I never got past the first few pages and likely sold the book at a garage sale. After reading the posts here, I just may have to revisit the Valley of the Horses . For the horses, not Jondalar.
Jean Auel and Anne Rice are the reasons I was considered “an old soul” by the time I hit 13.
I read all of them. Every one. Plains of Passage came out when I was a senior in HS and I waited at least 4 years for it to come out, with 12 and 9 year waits for the next 2.
The first three I read when I was 13 or so. I was so into them. I don’t know if my mother knew how much sex was in them, she might have been concerned – or maybe not. I was INTO these books – there was a discussion group called the AuelBoard (I don’t know if they still exist) and I was a regular visitor there.
Like so many, the last one broke me and I prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist. I’ll still re-read others – mostly the first 4 – on occasion. I (almost always) skip the throbbing manhood/”there’s no time I’m not ready for you Jondalar” sections.
Read the first two forty years ago. Actually took an Anthropology course in Jr College. Revisited the series just this past winter! Still looking for “Painted Caves” at the local Goodwill…
What was interesting this time around is that I able to pull up the maps to follow A&J’s journey ad I read.
The sex didn’t seem to leave much impression as a teen, but then I was also reading Woodwiss(sp) and Beatrice Small!
Reading the sex passages now took longer then what I need in actuality!
Glad I stumbled across your site.
My high school actually had the first 4 (absolutely crappy library for a high school, but VC Andrews and Jean Auel they had!), and I still remember reading the mammoth scene in PoP after a test in class and being sure that my classmates and teacher could *hear* me blushing.
I was super excited when Shelters of Stone came out, then in like the first ten pages, Jondalar is vaguely attracted to his teenage half-sister, and all my excitement died a quick death.
And THEN, when book 6 came out, I was working at a bookstore. A customer approached me with a copy of TLoPC and asked “So is this any good? It’s been so long since the last one.” I looked around, leaned in, and whispered “Get it from the library if you want to read it, I can pick you out three more books to spend $35 on that you’ll enjoy more.”
The Valley of Horses (book 2) was EVERYTHING awesome when I was in middle school. I never bothered with book 6 because book 5 was so dull, so in my mind Ayla and Jondalar are happily raising their family in France somewhere, no patriarchy involved.
The one thing I remember about the Mammoth Hunters is that Ayla learned to make white leather using pee. As you do.
Also, for some true crazysauce check out the Clan of the Cave Bear movie, starring Darryl Hannah as Ayla.
Omg!! Thank you so much for this! I had forgotten all about this series, but I remember that I really loved it as a teenager!
I’ve never read them, but I’ll never forget my big sister (just 2 years older and in middle school) pulling me aside and reading my scenes from the second book. (I think she was just so shocked she had to share them with someone.) Unfortunately for her, I let slip to Mom and Dad what she had done and to her utter embarrassment she had to show me the specific pages she shared. 🙂
Okay, my library had The Valley of Horses available. Downloaded and now I’ll see how Jondalar holds up to a Lorraine Heath Duke. I started reading An Affair With a Notorious Heiress this morning.
I read these books as a young married. My husband & I both enjoyed them, even though he never read them, if you catch my drift. I loved most of the descriptive stuff even though it did get to be a bit much as the series progressed. I loved the earth goddess cult in France so much I bought a Venus of Willendorf – and I still have it.
I started reading these books in middle school and loved them so much. At the time, PoP had been recently released. I reread the series at least three times before Shelters was released.
I forgot about LoPC, partly because I don’t have a physical copy, and partly because it suuuucked.
I borrowed my parents’ copies, and loved at least the first several. Looking back, yeah, she’s a complete Mary Sue, but I have massive love for Ranec and really wished she’d have hooked up with him instead of Jondalar. I don’t remember specifically the invention of the patriarchy, but I have a vague memory of some ceremony towards the end of the series (?) where she’s all hopped up on drugs and has some vision racing towards the future and one of her descendants is Christ or something? She sees skyscrapers? Unsure. In related news, I bought CotCB digitally on sale recently and it’s sitting in my TBR for when I am in the right mood for the CrazySauce. Also also, I’m enjoying the hell out of the review of LoPC on Goodreads. 🙂
I read the first 2 – but I didn’t purchase them, but read copies off the shelf sitting on the floor in the corner of the university bookshop (my excuse is that I was a poor first year university student, and they didn’t have the books in the library). I remember thinking that there were a lot of problems with the books, but they were different than anything else I had read at the time.
I remember reading and rereading Valley of the Horse, and mostly skipping over the Jondalar stuff, especially before he joined with with Ayla. I am confident that if my parents had had /any/ idea how much and descriptive sex there was, I wouldn’t have been allowed to read them. To be fair, I was a well sheltered 11 or 12 year old when I first picked it up. It had horse in the title! A few years later I got the first and third one.
A little quibble:
“she domesticates a horse and a lion”
Domestication takes selective breeding over generations. She tamed a lion and horse, and later a wolf.
I read these as a late teen, and Plains of Passage was just released as new. I don’t recall finishing book 3, had moved on to Anne Rice, and didn’t even know there was a book 5 until reading this article. Like others, my Mom had these in her extensive library and that’s how I found the Clan of the Cave Bear. Anyone remember the TV movie, with Daryl Hannah? Anyway, I never considered these to be romance books, and never read romance as a genre until about 5 years ago. Thanks for refreshing my memory about this series! Maybe someday I’ll pick up book 3 to refresh my memory and finish, and attempt 4 & 5 to complete the series. Still amazed at that-book 5 after so many years!
Oh, dear, it’s voice-crying-in-the-wilderness time again. I DNF’d Clan of the Cave Bear not long after it came out, and never even tried the others.
Things I remember:
–author patting herself on the back because every physical object described in the books corresponds to some actual archeological find, as if that’s all it takes to consider yourself anthropologically valid
–good Cro-Magnon vs. bad Neanderthal
–an endogamous clan totaling fewer than 20 members
–making the heroine blonde, an authorial decision which I wouldn’t hesitate to describe as immoral
It’s so funny that this got posted today… I just finished “Hunger” by Roxane Gay and she mentions this as the book that introduced her to sex. I thought I remembered hearing about it from the Bitchery, and come to find out I’m the only one who hasn’t read this! I’ll have to grab a copy for the next time I need some WTFery & wine