The Clan of the Cave Bear

Jean M. Auel's first novel, published in 1980, opens the six-book Earth's Children series on the Crimean Peninsula near the shores of the Black Sea, during the last Ice Age. An earthquake destroys the camp of a Cro-Magnon band and leaves a five-year-old girl alone on the steppe; mauled by a cave lion and close to death, she is found by a wandering Neanderthal clan whose own cave has just been buried.

The clan's medicine woman, Iza, keeps the child alive and adopts her, and the crippled shaman Creb — the Mog-ur — reads the cave lion's claw marks as the mark of a powerful totem. The girl, Ayla, is raised inside a people whose knowledge is inherited rather than learned, whose speech is largely gesture, and whose customs leave almost no room for a girl who is taller, paler, and cleverer than anyone around her. She learns their plants and their ritual, and breaks their strictest laws by teaching herself to hunt.

Brun, the clan's leader, comes to respect what she can do. His son Broud, who will lead the clan after him, does not: her every success diminishes him, and his resentment hardens into a cruelty the clan's own rules will not restrain. What Auel builds out of that conflict is not a survival adventure but a study of two kinds of human mind meeting for the first time — one that remembers everything and cannot imagine, one that can imagine and must therefore leave.

Researched from archaeological and ethnobotanical sources over years, and drawing on the Shanidar excavations for its picture of Neanderthal life, the novel was nominated for the American Book Award for best first novel and has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide.