Sometimes it feels as though entire hominid species have evolved in less time than it takes to read “The Land of Painted Caves,” the sixth and final installment of Jean M. Auel’s best-selling prehistoric saga, “Earth’s Children.” The extremely earnest, ambitious and often intriguing series, which began in 1980 with “The Clan of the Cave Bear,” attempts to encapsulate much of human (and proto-human) prehistory as it follows the life of a Cro-Magnon woman. She reintroduces herself early in “The Land of Painted Caves”:
“I am Ayla of the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii, acolyte of the Zelandoni, First Among Those Who Serve The Great Earth Mother, mated to Jondalar, Master Flint-Knapper and brother of Joharran, leader of the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii. Formerly I was Daughter of the Mammoth Hearth of the Lion Camp of the Mamutoi, Chosen by the spirit of the Cave Lion, Protected by the Cave Bear, and friend of the horses, Whinney, Racer, and Gray, and the four-legged hunter, Wolf.”
Um, okay if we just call you Ayla?
Even die-hard Auel fans may want to skim over those sections of the book where characters greet each other for the first time. Which happens fairly often. “The Land of the Painted Caves” unfolds in episodic fashion, following Ayla, her family and their cohort in seasonal and ritual migrations among other cave habitations and clans. There is not much of a plot, beyond some minor marital discord between Ayla and her beloved Cro-Magnon mate, Jondalar. The narrative is propelled by Auel’s knowledge (much of it necessarily speculative) of human species interaction during the late Pleistocene epoch, roughly 35,000 to 25,000 years ago.
Orphaned as a 5-year-old by an earthquake, Ayla was raised by Neanderthals, whom she refers to as the Clan but most other Cro-Magnons deride as Flatheads. In “The Land of Painted Caves,” Ayla is the mother of two children: a son fathered by one of the Clan, a child she was forcibly separated from when she was cast out of her adoptive kinship group; and a daughter by Jondalar. She is also a Zelandoni acolyte, a medicine woman and healer viewed with awe and sometimes suspicion because of her skill in taming animals previously seen only as prey (horses) or predators (wolves).
But Ayla’s gifts don’t stop with being the first to domesticate a Pleistocene horse. She’s an innovator who sometimes wears men’s clothing and develops or adapts new technologies such as the fire-starter, spear-thrower, harness and travois. She utilizes and understands sign language (the mostly non-verbal Clan’s primary means of communication); has prescient knowledge of moon phases and astronomy; possesses an excellent grasp of basic psychological counseling and legal techniques, as well as keen insight into human contraceptive and reproductive issues, which, then as now, prove to be hugely divisive among both men and women.
Sadly, Auel is no stylist. Her prose is stilted, reminiscent of middle-school texts of 50 years ago, and relies heavily on the info dump:
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