The Clan of The Cave Bear - Historical Backdrop

Historical Backdrop

The novel references the "coming" advance of "the polar ice" sheets, setting the story before 18,000 years Before Present, when the farthest southern encroachment of the last glacial period of the current Ice Age occurred. Auel's timeframe, somewhere between 28,000 and 25,000 years B.P., corresponds with archeological estimates of the Neanderthal branch of humankind dying out some time between 30,000 and 22,000 years B.P..

While it is generally believed by the archaeological community that the Aurignacian tool making culture that existed until about 26,000 years was Cro-Magnon, recent findings suggest the possibility that the civilization was in fact "the last hurrah" of the Neanderthals' civilization and racial existence. The culture and loci of the finds better match Auel's portrayed homelands for the Cro-Magnon cultures in her works: the plains of the Ukraine and Danube valleys and across the Alps to western France, which is consistent with mainstream archeological thinking.

Surviving Cro-Magnon artifacts and features include huts, cave paintings, carvings and antler-tipped spears. The remains of tools suggest that they knew how to make woven clothing. They had huts, constructed of rocks, clay, bones, branches, and animal hide/fur. These early humans used manganese and iron oxides to paint pictures and may have created the first calendar around 15,000 years ago.

The flint tools found in association with the remains at the first Cro-Magnon site have associations with the Aurignacian culture that Lartet had identified a few years before he found the skeletons.

If the Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals co-existed in the same regions at the same time, they might be presumed to have come in contact with one another; the former are often credited with causing the latter's extinction, although modern humans seem to have coexisted with Neanderthals for up to 60,000 years in the Levant and for more than 15,000 years in France.

Auel's research led to the incorporation of such data into her story arch and narrative. Her books have been commended for their anthropological authenticity and their ethnobotanical accuracy. However, archaeological research at the time and after the first book was published suggests that some prehistorical details in the series are inaccurate and others fictional, and that specifications of prehistorical milestones are sometimes arbitrary and inconsistent. For example, the differences between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens may have been exaggerated or underestimated in the series; it has been found that Neanderthals had a hyoid bone and may thus have been capable of using vocal language and not as dependent on sign language as portrayed in the series (the existence of a Neanderthal hyoid bone wasn't confirmed until 1983, some years after the first book in the series was published).

The novel also suggests that one of the reasons why the Neanderthals are in decline is because their accumulated knowledge and experience inherited from their ancestors, renders them slower to adapt to the environment than Cro-Magnons, and therefore less able to compete with the more flexible Cro-Magnon. These ideas are directly related to genetic memory. Their spiritual leader is also able to trigger the clan's genetic memories, which extend back to a time prior to the existence of hominids.