![]() He's always been very helpful about my writing. We took our sleeping bags and it was very cold, but we survived. ''When I told my husband we were going to spend the night in the snow, he said, 'Oh you are, are you?' But he came. For the first book she learnt how to build a snow cave by enrolling for an SAS-like survival course on the nearby Cascade Mountains. ![]() And as I did more research, I realised the Neanderthals were also quite intelligent, not at all like the savages depicted by Hollywood.'' I did some research in my Encyclopedia Britannica, went to the library and discovered there really was a time when we shared Ice Age Europe with the Neanderthals. ''I don't know where the idea came from, but I thought it would make an interesting short story. ''Not just different coloured hair, or eyes, or skin. ''Initially I had this idea of a young girl living with people who were different,'' she recalls. ''I said that we've all got a little Neanderthal in us 30 years ago.''Īmazingly, given that Auel is now accepted by scientists as a creditable authority on her subject, she didn't start out to write about the Ice Age in Europe. ''They've found that almost everyone of Caucasian extraction has at least 1 to 4 per cent of Neanderthal in their DNA,'' Auel says with a laugh. So imagine her glee last year when the old scientific orthodoxy was turned on its head. ''When Ayla got pregnant by a Neanderthal, some people objected, saying Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals were two distinct species which never interbred.'' But it was important for the story for Ayla to get a son.'' That scene also provoked some scientific criticism. ![]() In fact, says Auel, ''the rape was probably the most difficult scene I've ever written because I hate violence, particularly sexual violence. But it is the explicit sex scenes (particularly in the second book) that have caused most offence. Creation-theory zealots who believe the biblical version regularly complain about her story's dependence on evolution reality. ''The books have been banned in a couple of places like Texas,'' she points out. Of course, it also helps sales that Auel's books have stirred both religious and sexual controversies in her homeland. But the reason Earth's Children has amassed so many unlikely fans (the Everest mountaineer Chris Bonington is a devotee, for example) is Auel's meticulous research and fascinating understanding of Ice Age botany, herbology, archaeology and anthropology. Crucially in the first book, she is raped by Broud, the future clan leader.Īuel's subsequent novels - The Valley of Horses (1982), The Mammoth Hunters (1985), The Plains of Passage (1990) and The Shelters of Stone (2002) - continue Ayla's search for ''the Others'' (fellow Cro-Magnons or humans) her love affair with Jondalar on the plains of the Ukraine their journey along the Danube River and their arrival in Jondalar's homeland, the painted caves of southern France.Īs critics point out, her saga is part coming-of-age story, part romantic epic and part exploration of prehistoric invention, with Ayla and Jondalar supposedly key figures in an absurd number of breakthrough events in human technology. The rest of Iza's Neanderthal clan accept the strange creature in their midst to varying degrees. The novels, set in Europe 30,000 years ago, follow the fortunes of Ayla, a human girl who is orphaned at the age of five by an earthquake on the Crimean peninsula and adopted by a Neanderthal medicine woman, Iza. So why has it taken her so long to finish? ''I'm just slow,'' she says plaintively. Especially considering she had already mapped out the entire series before the first book, The Clan of the Cave Bear, even hit the bookstores in 1980. Six books in 31 years is not exactly prolific. On the plus side, she doesn't have to take part in publicity campaigns too often.
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