Communication is strained because the Clan, unlike Ayla, relies only on sign language and express almost nothing with their faces. Despite this, tensions still arise between Ayla and the Clan. To many, Ayla is now the Clan’s good luck charm, and they will therefore protect her at any cost. When the Clan discovers where Ayla has run off to, they see she has inadvertently led them to a massive cave structure that serves as the perfect new home. Despite suspicion of Ayla’s looks from the stockier, darker-hued Neanderthals who refer to her as one of “The Others,” Iza and her brother Creb, the “Mo-gur” or shaman of the Clan, adopt the little girl as their own.Īs Ayla regains her strength, the rest of the Clan’s opinion of Ayla brightens considerably, especially when she wanders from the Clan one day while its members argue over the difficulty of finding a new home. She brings the little girl back to her people, who with their leader Brun are also searching for a new home in the wake of the same earthquake that killed Ayla’s family. An indeterminate amount of time later, a medicine woman named Iza who belongs to a group of Neanderthals called “The Clan” finds Ayla and rescues her.

After she just barely escapes with her life from a run-in with a vicious cave tiger that mauls her leg, Ayla collapses. For days on end, the five-year-old wanders alone, naked and starving. Ayla is a blond-haired, blue-eyed Cro-Magnon girl living in Prehistoric Europe when her entire family and its camp is destroyed by an earthquake.

The first of Auel’s Earth’s Children series of novels, The Clan of the Cave Bear tells the story of a five-year-old Cro-Magnon girl living 18,000 years ago during the Quaternary Ice Age who loses her entire family after a devastating earthquake. The Clan of the Cave Bear is a prehistoric adventure novel that became a best-seller when it was published in 1980 by the American author, Jean M.

Jean auel clan of the cave bear series