Jean M. Auel

Jean M. Auel is an American author whose Earth's Children series — beginning with The Clan of the Cave Bear — brought prehistoric Europe vividly to life and sold over forty-five million copies worldwide.

Jean M. Auel had no background in fiction when she began researching prehistoric Europe after imagining a story set in the Ice Age. The research she undertook — into archaeology, anthropology, geology, botany, and the lives of Neanderthals and modern humans — was extensive enough to produce a novel of unusual specificity. The Clan of the Cave Bear (1980) follows Ayla, a Cro-Magnon girl orphaned by an earthquake and adopted by a Neanderthal clan, through childhood among people of a fundamentally different cognitive type.

The Earth’s Children series — six novels across thirty-one years — follows Ayla through prehistoric Europe, covering her relationships, skills, and the encounters that eventually lead her to her own people. Auel’s research into Ice Age plant medicine, tool-making, and animal domestication gives the books a texture unusual in historical fiction about periods without written records. Ayla’s discovery of domesticating horses, the spear-thrower, and fire-starting techniques by striking flint gives each novel a narrative of practical ingenuity alongside its romantic and interpersonal plots.

The Clan of the Cave Bear remains the most praised of the six novels, and is readable as a standalone story. The Valley of Horses (1982) and The Mammoth Hunters (1985) are generally considered the strongest sequels. The later books — The Plains of Passage, The Shelters of Stone, The Land of Painted Caves — were more unevenly received as the series’s length began to work against the pace that distinguished the early volumes. The series nonetheless sold over forty-five million copies and brought a plausible prehistoric world to millions of readers.