Trivia / Earth's Children

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: Jean M. Auel did actually do quite a lot of research for the books, though some theories were still evolving at the time and thus information could be limited or contradictory. Either way, several of Auel's ideas about Neanderthals aged really well (others not so much).
  • Auel mentioned being particularly happy that science eventually vindicated her support of the theory that Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon could interbreed; when The Clan of the Cave Bear first came out in 1980, she received criticism for this plot point from some scientists due to a supposed lack of accuracy. However, decades later a lot more evidence came to light supporting that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens can and did interbreed, and that some modern humans have Neanderthal ancestry.
  • It was once believed that Neanderthals didn't have a concept of an afterlife or death rites, whilst in Auel's books they have a complex religion that includes belief in an afterlife and elaborate burial rites for their dead. Anthropologists eventually found evidence that Neanderthals indeed intentionally buried their dead and also appear to have buried personal effects and tools with them (suggesting they were intended for use in an afterlife).
  • Other Neanderthal discoveries since the books came out include some pretty sophisticated medical knowledge, comparable to Auel's description of Iza's pharmocopaea and treatment methods, up to and including penicillin.
• Accidentally Correct Zoology: In The Valley of Horses, Ayla claims to have seen a sabertooth cat once during her time alone. This is treated as a case of Not So Extinct, as sabertooths were believed to have disappeared from Europe long before modern humans settled it. However, in 2003, paleontologists published the discovery of a sabertooth jaw in the Netherlands from right around the time setting of the book.
• Baby Name Trend Starter: 'Ayla' is a Turkish and Scottish feminine name (in the latter case it's a variant on Aila or Isla), which became a lot more popular in Western countries from the 1980's onwards following the success of the series.
• Banned in China: Many of the books in the series have been banned from libraries in a few of the American states, including Texas, due to the explicit sexual content and depiction of unconventional sexual practices, the depiction of a nature-based, goddess-worshipping prehistoric society living alongside Neanderthals (along with other mentions of evolution), and scenes of rape involving a pubescent child in The Clan of the Cave Bear. Between 1990 and 1999, the series was collectively listed as the 19th most challenged book in the US by the American Library Association.
• Extremely Lengthy Creation: The fifth book, The Shelters of Stone, took twelve years to write (especially in comparison to the previous four books, which only had five years at most between releases). This was due to the author wanting to do more research.
• No Adaptations Allowed: Downplayed. Jean M. Auel was not happy about the way the 1986 film adaptation of The Clan of the Cave Bear turned out (partly because she was completely left out of the film's production despite previously being promised she'd be consulted). As a result, she never sold the movie rights again, although she stated in a 2011 interview that her children were free to sell the rights after she'd died. She also gave permission for a television series based on the first book to be made in 2014, though it ultimately didn't go ahead.
• Referenced by...:
  • The character of Ayla in Chrono Trigger - who is also a cavewoman - is a Shout-Out to the main protagonist of this series.
  • It's speculated that Ayla from Age of Barbarian: ARENA is a reference to this series' Ayla, given the character is a blonde Amazonian Beauty with a cavewoman-esque outfit and Stone Age weaponry.
  • In Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, the mission Clan of the Cave Raccoon (which takes place in 10,000 BC) is a play on the title of the first book, The Clan of the Cave Bear.
  • In the DuckTales (2017) episode "Challenge of the Senior Junior Woodchucks" Scrooge mentions a location called "Cave of the Bear Clan".
• Schedule Slip: The letter of the trope is averted: Auel never missed release dates because she just didn't announce any. But the delays between books grew quite a bit. Auel admitted that she'd mostly planned out the overarching plot for the series when she wrote The Clan of the Cave Bear, but that she's a slow writer and so the series took longer than expected to complete.
• Science Marches On:
  • Ayla is blonde and blue-eyed, and many other Cro-Magnons have fair hair and light eyes, but it is now believed that these mutations appeared in Europeans thousands of years later than the books' time period.
  • Furthermore, all Neanderthals are portrayed as having brown hair and eyes (at least in the first book), and Ayla is considered unusual for her blonde hair and blue eyes, but abundant evidence of Neanderthals with fair hair and light eyes has been found since. Auel incorporated this into later installments, with Ayla and Jondalar meeting a blonde Clan woman named Yorga in the fourth book (published in 1990) and it being suggested that the Neanderthals Ayla lived with just happened to be largely dark-haired and dark-eyed.
  • In the books, a major difference between the Clan and Cro-Magnon is that the former cannot vocalize as well and so primarily rely on a comprehensive signed language to communicate. Eventually, a Neanderthal hyoid bone was discovered, suggesting that they could vocalize just as well as Cro-Magnon after all; however, this discovery wasn't made until 1989, nearly a decade after the first book's publication and well after Auel began her research for the series.
• Sequel Gap: The final three books were released in 1990, 2002 (twelve year gap), and 2011 (nine year gap). The first book was released in 1980, meaning there were over thirty years between the release of the first book and the last.
• Similarly Named Works:
  • A Russian writer named Sergey Pokrovsky wrote a novel titled Mammoth Hunters in 1937, which was also centered around life in the Ice Age. The book was later published under the same name in 1956, combined with its 1940 sequel.
  • A Czech author named Eduard Štorch had likewise published a novel called Mammoth Hunters in 1918.
  • The Land of Painted Caves has a similar title to the children's novel Boy of the Painted Cave; both are set in France in the Ice Age and feature a protagonist with a wolf companion.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Jean M. Auel stated she originally set out to write only one book but that during the research and writing process, she decided the story would be better told in multiple books.
  • Word of God was that there were plans for a seventh book (or at the very least Auel said she had enough material to produce another book), but promotional material for The Land of Painted Caves confirmed it would be the final book in the series and there have been no mentions of a sequel thus far. Then again, considering Auel's track record when it comes to sequels, who knows?
  • There was an attempt to develop a TV series based on the first book by Fox 21 TV Studios and Lifetime, with a pilot being ordered and filmed in 2014 for a 2015 airdate. It would've starred Millie Brady as Ayla, Charlene McKenna as Iza, Hal Ozsan as Brun, Johnny Ward as Broud and Aidan McArdle as Creb, with Ron Howard as one of the executive producers. However, the pilot ultimately wasn't picked up by Lifetime and attempts by Fox 21 to shop it to other networks was unsuccessful. Reportedly, there were disputes between Fox 21 and Lifetime that led to the latter passing on the show over the number and length of episodes; Lifetime apparently wanted a miniseries with four feature-length episodes, but for economic reasons Fox 21 wanted it to be a regular cable series in terms of episode count and runtime.

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