This fictional history book contains so much reality and possibility, that I half expect archaeologists to someday find Ayla buried somewhere in Europe, to find the crumpled and mangled remains of Creb in his cave. This is how I wish I had learned history in school.
I read this the first time when I was 16, and now that I'm much older, I appreciate how much of what Jean Auel has written is accurate. As a young woman, I thought she did a lot of extra description and I skipped the pages of explanation of fauna and flora and geology. Now, enthralled by the subjects of our expanding human minds, how we as a society have evolved, and what we've grown through in spirituality, I see how much the author has offered us in her writing.

The slow evolution of the human mind is evidenced in the real possibility of the story of the heroine, Ayla. Her being raised by "animals," their spiritual way of reasoning and coping with life, her learning a new way of being when her first years of childhood felt that there was something more it all has a logic to it that not only suggests how the mind has to build itself, but causes the story to flow while being chocked full of the oldest of human emotions and dramas. The constant threads of prejudice and of unconditional understanding and love are found in this book as they are today, but the way these familiar threads are woven is displayed in the relationships one Cro-Magnon woman has with the Clan people that defy the logic of her time and begin the evolution of ours.

Through Jean Auel's writing I have discovered the excitement of the history of our social existence, and of our ability to invent as we need, and the strength and courage it takes to move forward as an individual and as a society. Ayla's forward-thinking mind hit mental and emotional walls throughout her life with the simple logic of social rules that are comfortably obeyed without question by everyone else in the Clan. Her ingenuity and ability to press the social boundaries of the people of the Clan with undeniable logic demonstrates what it takes to develop a more complex and functional society like the one she didn't know she came from.

The belief in animal totems, along with religious experiences that stem from hallucinogenic plants that the spiritual leader Creb used, suggest how the sense of a higher power or deeper reason became so important. Needing help to find reasons for things, or places to hunt, or to ask for a blessing, requires for there to be a bigger or stronger entity to ask. A collective memory, as the Clan describes their easily-attained knowledge, could be the oldest of gods. The drugged water they drink to achieve higher knowledge takes them deeper into that collective. It is a way to reason without basic logic, to make things feel okay without reason. Ayla shows us this through her outsider's eyes, and by just being herself defies their spiritual understanding.

This book isn't just a fanciful tale that sounds logical and has some creative ideas in it. It really teaches us about ourselves, and through her research and imagination suggests how things might truly have come about - compressed in a very humane and emotional story. Jean Auel makes it all feel real with the perfect placing of her words in Clan of the Cave Bear.

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