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With thirty-four million books in print in twenty-nine languages by 2000, Oregon writer Jean M. Auel has become a worldwide publishing sensation with her unlikely "Earth's Children" series about life in the Paleolithic world. Beginning with The Clan of t...

BILL ERVOLINO The Record (Bergen County, NJ) 06-13-1999 BACK TO THE CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR By BILL ERVOLINO Date: 06-13-1999, Sunday Section: YOUR TIME Edition: All Editions -- Sunday Whenever I begin making summer vacation plans, I find myself magically transported...

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["The Clan of the Cave Bear"] tells the tale of a band of prehistoric hunter-gatherers living on the Crimean peninsula near the shores of the Black Sea…. These people, at large some 35,000 years ago, are representatives of a dying breed, among the last of the Neanderthal line. The band faces new tensions, new troubles, which will ultimately prove its undoing. It has just taken in one of the "Others," a 5-year-old girl foundling named Ayla whose parents have been killed in ...

So few solid facts are known about [the Middle Paleolithic] period that one can hardly criticize an author for filling in the canyon-sized gaps with speculation, particularly when the authorities themselves disagree. Can one, then, reasonably call [Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear and Bjorn Kurtén's Dance of the Tiger] historical (or prehistorical) novels, and demand that they conform to the rules governing that genre? I believe one can and must, if only because both authors hav...

[Despite] an arid narrative style that would have crushed a less audacious story, Auel has fashioned [The Clan of the Cave Bear] … with nuggets of archeology and anthropology. (p. 64) Auel has created a remarkable, speculative portrait of a preconscious world, different from science fiction because of the constant echoes of human experience found there. The documentary effect is achieved by sprinkled passages of Dick-and-Jane anthropology on topics such as herbs, fire transporting or toolmaking. As a...