She may be an adopted member of the clan but, no matter what anyone does, she is not Clan: she is born to the Others and, as Ayla grows older, nature gets in the way of nurture. She learns to communicate as fluently as any other child, and proves an adept student of medicine and healing. The child, whose real name is too complex for Creb and his people to articulate, is given the closest approximation they can master: Ayla.Īs the years pass, the clan’s initial suspicion of Ayla fades and she finds a warm and loving home with Creb and his sibling Iza, and Iza’s daughter Uba. She learns that any man can command any woman, and must be obeyed that a woman must sit before a man and wait to be given permission to speak that water coming from the eyes is a strange sickness that doesn’t afflict those around her and, most of all, that they are all part of the Clan, the great wider community of people united by their common spirits and history. She must also adapt to a new set of social and cultural mores. Accustomed to speech, the child has to abandon her chattering and learn the complex system of gestures and movements with which her new community express themselves. She finds herself surrounded by a group of people who not only look very different to herself, and who find her as bizarre and unsettling as she finds them, but who also have an entirely alien concept of communication.

Under the care of the clan’s medicine woman Iza, and the protection of their powerful holy man or mog-ur, Creb, the child begins to return to health. Weakened by hunger and loss of blood from an attack by a cave lion, she is providentially discovered by a clan of Neanderthal who, much against their leader’s better judgement, carry her along with them. When a five-year-old girl is orphaned by an earthquake, she finds herself alone and unskilled against the full cruelty of nature and the elements. In the aftermath of The Inheritors, I decided it was time to make a start on this other famous story about contact between Neanderthal man and the new race of Homo sapiens. And now, twenty years later, I’ve finally got round to it. I remember being very impressed by the thick novels she was carrying around, and decided that I would have to read the books myself one day.

In our first years at secondary school, one of my classmates was much taken with the Earth’s Children series by Jean M.

Jean auel clan of the cave bear