Headscratchers / Earth's Children

• In The Mammoth Hunters, the old man, Mamut, had lived with Ayla's clan decades ago, long enough to be accepted as a hunter. It's clear in his conversations with Ayla that he remembers plenty about his Clan days. Why hadn't he taught Rydag any sign language? If having Ayla around reminds him of that period of his life, what did he think seeing Rydag every day, especially since he'd had a Clan mate himself?
  • Because before Ayla, there was a strong stigma against the Clan, and Mamut was keeping his time with them a secret. When Ayla came along and admitted she was raised by the Clan, the stigma was lifted with them, and there was a chance to teach Rydag sign language.
    • Plus his mastery of them was not even a fraction of Ayla's by the time Rydag came along. He didn't know enough to teach him.
  • He wouldn't have had to admit he'd learned signs from the Clan to have taught them to Rydag; he could've just pretended to have made them up himself.

• It seems to me that the author didn't have an editor for The Shelters of Stone. There are a hell of a lot of grammar mistakes in that book. Most of them are comma splices, that's when a comma is used where a period or dash or sometimes a semicolon would make more sense (like I just did with this sentence.) Also, many sentences are ambiguous and/or just poorly constructed — for example, the author will be talking about several female characters, and then refer to one of them as "she" when it isn't immediately clear who is being referred to.
  • Also, she suddenly refers to Willomar as Willamar. That was annoying.
  • It seems like she didn't have an editor for the last few books. So much repetition, etc too.

• The Neanderthals are portrayed as stupid while the Cro Magnons are "superior." Neanderthals aren't even a direct ancestor of Cro Magnons; they weren't less evolved— their evolution had simply taken a different path— and all the other inaccuracies in the books aside, this is the supreme one that really bothers me.
  • Firstly, the Neanderthals are not seen as stupid except by some of the characters, they just seem to have a genetic memory which is by now nearly full. Cro-Magnons on the other hand don't have that memory, but can learn new things much easier.
  • I thought it was Fridge Brilliance: if the Cro-Magnons weren't better at adapting to their environment than the Neandethals, then they wouldn't have completely displaced the Neanderthals, now would they?
  • It's mentioned several times in the first book that Neanderthals, while related to Cro-Magnons, are "a different branch on the tree of man", to paraphrase the author. Nowhere (aside from the prejudice/ignorance of Cro-Magnon characters) does the author state that Neanderthals are "stupid" or that Cro-Magnons are "superior". They just evolved differently.
  • It's outright stated that the Neanderthals are just as intelligent as any homo sapiens, they just lack certain abilities that we have and vice versa, because we evolved along slightly different paths. The Neanderthals have genetic memory; each Neanderthal has access to a vast well of information spanning back over a hundred thousand years, and this memory is gender divided. This is why the backs of their brains are so big and why Ayla is such a good medicine woman; she was taught by Iza, a Neanderthal who knows more information about the medicinal qualities of more plants than any Cro-Magnon could ever hope to learn. However, Cro-Magnon's have evolved large fore brains, and this is the reason that we can abstract ideas and concepts so well. This is why we can count better, and why we can generate ideas and apply them to the real world with so much more ease, and thus why our technology is already beyond theirs.

• Ayla discovers many things that would normally take generations and years to develop. She also tames a wild horse from birth to "domesticate" it. Animals are not "domesticated" if they are raised from birth as such; they will still act "wild" no matter how you raise them. Domestication is a genetic change.
  • Actually it's a bit of both, yes they're still wild in a sense, but they're a lot less wild than those raised exclusively by their own species. In fact if domestication was entirely genetic then we wouldn't have been able to domesticate them in the first place.
    • Not quite- domestication is, by definition, selectively breeding a species to make it more useful to humans, like silver foxes (specifically bred to be less aggressive, not just trained) and indirectly dogs. You guys are thinking about taming, which is the process of making something less wild, but doesn't stop a normally wild animal from still being skittish or yield offspring with similar behavior. Normally, traits in animals that are useful to us aren't necessarily useful to the animals but still pop up in wild populations every so often by way of mutation. And, ever so often, you'll get a wild animal that has those traits that normally wouldn't survive as well because of them, but under human use, survives and spreads those genes. For an example from Guns, Germs, and Steel, wild almond trees contain enough cyanide to make humans very sick. However, every so often, 'sweet' almond trees pop up in wild populations- these are trees that lack the gene to produce cyanide in their fruit. Normally, they lose most of their crop to birds and other animals, since they lack the protection cyanide gave them. Humans discovered some of them, and through latrines and eventually intentional planting, eventually made them much more common and further selectively bred them to be more 'modern'. Even aggression in animals has some genetic influences- less-aggressive dogs had less agressive pups which, combined with training, ended up more as dogs. The videos on silver fox domestication break it down better, but it's mostly genetics.
  • Not to mention the timing is... Bewildering to say the least. Horses were domesticated around 4000 BC - in other words, long after the agricultural revolution. I am not sure if this one can't be simply chalked up to Dated History, but still, come the fuck on. People running around on horses at the same time Neanderthals are still alive?! According the modern research, that's just stupid. Also, the first horses to be domesticated probably weren't ridden, but rather used as a source of meat and milk.

• The Neanderthals are all dark skinned and haired while the Cro Magnons are fair skinned and haired. Evidence points to quite the opposite.
  • When the books started there was no evidence either way so this one I find to be excusable.
  • Actually, the evidence points both ways. By the time the books are set in, most of Cro Magnon humans have already branched into most of the proto ethnic subgroups. By that time it's entirely reasonable for Cro Magnon humans to be fair skinned/haired. Additionally, in one of the later books (Plains of Passage) Ayla and Jondalar encounter a Neanderthal and his mate, both of whom are described as being fair haired and skinned. It seems that the clan Ayla lived with, and their relative clans, were simply a branch of Neanderthals with dark skin and hair.
    • As for that first point - no, it most definitely isn't reasonable, if the archaeological and genetic evidence is to be believed. According to them, genes that make modern Europeans and eastern Asians paler are only about 18 000 years old, at most, and many populations kept their darker coloration well into the neolithic era (see Cheddar man). Not to mention blonde hair, for which earliest evidence is about 15 000 years old, and blue eye colour, which was proven to be widespread by the mesolithic.
    • It's specifically stated, in the scene where Brun's Clan find Ayla, that Iza's skin tone is changing "from winter pallor to summer tan".
  • In The Mammoth Hunters Ranec is half African - his father had taken a Journey to Africa where he mated with an African woman. Ranec is most definitely black. Also, Jondolar's father's second wife is Asian, and their daughter is half-Asian.

• Something that always bothered me to no end once I re-read the series for the first time and picked up on it. In Valley of Horses Ayla tells Jondalar that the Clan has no sign/word for "I love you". Instead, they express the sentiment by showing it, say if Ayla prepares Creb's favourite tea for him in the morning. But in Clan of the Cave Bear Ayla, Iza and Creb frequently toss "I love you" around in conversation. Certainly they express it through actions as well, but they most definitely use signs/words to say it too. Did the author just forget while writing the second book, or am I missing something?
  • Probably forgot. Iza's last words to Ayla are "I always loved you best." And if you want to count the film as canon, James Remar as Creb has a beautiful moment where he says "I love Ayla. She is the daughter I never had."
  • This could be explained as Translation Convention. The Clan's language is vastly different than English - sign language plus posture, facial expressions, etc. instead of spoken words - so every time we read characters' conversations, the words we read are a translation. Likely, when Ayla, Iza and Creb are quoted as saying "I love you" this is a translation of them making the gestures the Clan use to show love. Creb telling someone else he loves Ayla is more likely to be an error, but it's not impossible the Clan has gestures or actions to express love in the 3rd person.

• Regarding Ayla's ability to imitate the sounds animals make, from a horse's whinny to a lion's roar to a bird's song - is it even at all possible? Can a human being duplicate sounds like that? Do we have the lung power and the vocal chords for it? The books don't state that she's merely good at imitating these sounds - she can do it well enough that not only other people are fooled, but animals as well. For me this has always gone beyond my willing suspension of disbelief, though is it actually a case of Reality Is Unrealistic? While we're at it, is it also genuinely possible to always be able to tell when a person is lying based solely on body language? Lie detectors aren't able to get the truth 100 % of the time, so can a human being do so just by observation? Ayla can do it to the point where she can win most of the games the Mamutoi play.
  • In regards to being able to tell if someone's lying via body language, it is possible. If you're trained to observe body language or non-verbal communication and their meanings, you can make pretty accurate interpretations of behavior, including being to tell if someone's being deceitful. That said, interpretations of non-verbal communication are subjective to a degree and you can't be 100% accurate; you also have to consider that in some cultures certain gestures, movements and so on can have different meanings. Ayla's abilities are perhaps a bit exaggerated, but considering she's been essentially trained to observe and accurately interpret body language since childhood, it's not unreasonable she'd be pretty good at it.
  • As for humans being able to mimic sounds other animals make fairly accurately, that's also possible for some people, usually with years of practice; some voice actors have even basically built their careers around mimicking animals.
• In the first book, when the men question Ayla about her sling-hunting, Zoug remarks that Vorn has been training for just as many years as she. Was it really necessary for Ayla to volunteer the information that she started on the exact same day? Things just might have gone differently had she kept that specific detail to herself.
  • She would have had to explain where she found the sling she practiced with, but could have simply said she found it on the ground and felt compelled to pick it up, and that she watched later practice sessions.
    • Ayla is a child in this scene, less than ten years old, who knows she's in big trouble and is being told to explain herself by authority figures. She probably didn't think to omit that detail and just told the truth exactly to avoid getting into more trouble.
      • Remember, too, that the Clan is not only incapable of lying, but their body language is refined enough that others can even tell when someone is withholding information. Ayla, who is an Outsider, is capable of both lying and concealing the truth, but she has learned from the Clan that you just don't do that, no matter what the circumstances. It's possible she didn't even know she could conceal the full truth.

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