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.)
I discovered these in middle school in the early 90s (my mom had CotCB stashed in a box in the attic). Good times. I’ve read the first 4 numerous times but #5 only once, and #6 not at all because I heard which direction the plot went and I was so, so disappointed. I like to just pretend the series ends with book 4, with A+J being welcomed into J’s tribe or whatever.
This series totally introduced me to book sexy times!
My mom read CotCB so when I asked to read it (12 maybe?) she was fine. She got the second one but didn’t have time, so I read it first. With HUGE eyes. She mentioned to my grandma I had read it and grandma flipped out. When mom read it after that, she asked what I thought of the sex scenes. Then said “we’ll it happens to all of us some day” Head exploded. But man did that book make the rounds at school.
Years later was in a used bookstore with a guy and there were a bunch of Valley of the Horses on rack. I said hey, watch this, I still remember the page number of the sex scenes (as you do) and flipped one open. Those pages had totally been ripped out! I liked to think that someone couldn’t bear to get rid of the good parts. 😉 The next book I flipped open did have them. And they were just as hot as I remembered.
Oh, Jondalar the woman maker.
I loved these books, and was sad, not just for Ayla but for myself, when she was forced to leave her people at the end of CotCB. The Clan were fascinating and so real to me that I vividly remember Isa and Creb, and oh how I hated Broud. It is relatable that a small group made such a cruel choice to cast someone vulnerable out, morally weakened by the shaky, authoritarian style of an inexperienced and inferior new leader. The book left me with an increased curiosity and respect for prehistoric people. I guess I didn’t dislike the last book as much as others did, but it did infuriate me that once again Jondalar was so selfish and grew so little, in contrast to Ayla’s far richer shamanic journey. I wished the matriarchy didn’t have to end, in the book or reality, but I understand Auel’s choice to make it literally the end of an era as a logical way to end the epic series. The painted caves were an amazing anthropological discovery and a moving way to connect the characters’ experience to the present.
I read book 2 first. Loved it at age 13. Soon found book 1 and 3 too. Still like and have revisited books 2-4. Read book 5 but found it somewhat dull, and even if I own book 6, it is somewhere on my shelves, I haven’t read it. The comments here are making me believe I should just forget it where it is, and not read it.
I read the first four as they came out; I was an adult, but I wasn’t reading romance, so they kind of filled a space for me. The Mary Sue thing just got to be so extreme that I dodn’t care what happened after book four.
My best friend’s daughter just had a little girl and named her Ayla. I do not have the nerve to ask if that’s based on these books. At least she didn’t name her Mary Sue.
I read the first several books as they were released before I tired and moved on. I really (really) loved Clan, but the successive books didn’t have much to offer me–other than the Jondalar sex scenes, but even those palled after awhile. I was just out of college so I’d read plenty of crazy and/or racy books before then (like those Angelique books–anyone remember those?–The Story of O, etc.) so I was more keen on the history aspect before it all got so ridiculous. It was years before I ever heard of a Mary Sue, but I recognized one when I saw her. Seriously, I half expected Ayla to split the atom or something.
I’ve never had any desire to revisit the books (or read the ones I never got around to), but this has been a fun trip down memory lane.
I checked into the research when the first two books came out. The technical details on making tools, etc. seemed on spot for the accepted theories at the time. I was intrigued about the Cro Magnum/Neanderthal culture thing. I remember keeping up with the popular readings on that for a number of years after the first couple of books. I distinctly remember that a dig uncovered a site where Cro Magnum/Neanderthal lived together and there seemed to be examples of a mix of the two. Speculation that it wasn’t such a us-against-them split where CM replaced N and struggled against each other as was postulated. Really sparked a life long interest in “pre-history” culture.
Yeah, my mom loves these books. When she has nothing to read/is in a book slump/gets hit by the impulse she rereads all of them. Like, at least yearly? I love my mom but I’m suddenly questioning all of her life choices.
I read the first 4 books as a teen, and for the life of me can’t remember anything abut 3 and 4… Laughing at J’s Magic peen. Exactly!! One of my earliest experiences with sex scenes, as well as Bertrice Small.