Many of the people begin to regard Ayla as lucky, especially since good fortune continues to come their way as she lives among them. After traveling with them for a while and starting to heal, Ayla wanders away from the group when they stop to discuss what they should do since they haven't found a new home, and discovers a huge, beautiful cave, perfect for their needs. The people call her Ayla, the closest they can come to pronouncing her birth name. He cites the cave lion attack the girl experienced shortly before being discovered as proof that its spirit marked her so that she could be adopted into the Clan. Through meditation, Creb comes to believe that the child may be protected by the spirit of the cave lion, a powerful totem never given to a woman and only to very few men.

Brun allows Iza to treat the dying child and agrees to adopt her providing Creb can discover her personal totem spirit. The Clan worships spiritual representations of Earthly animals, called 'totems', that they believe can influence their lives by sending good or bad luck, and for whom Mog-ur acts as an intermediary. Creb is the group's 'Mog-ur' or shaman, despite being deformed as a result of a difficult birth caused by his abnormally large head, and the later loss of an arm and eye after being attacked by a cave bear. The child is adopted by Iza and her eldest brother Creb. The medicine woman of the group, Iza, discovers the ailing girl and asks permission from her brother Brun, the Clan leader, to help her, despite the child being clearly a member of 'the Others,' the distrusted antagonists of the Clan. Their cave was destroyed in the earthquake and they are searching for a new home. The narrative switches to a group of people who call themselves 'Clan' and who the reader comes to understand are Neanderthal. Having been attacked and nearly killed by a cave lion and suffering from starvation, exhaustion, and infection of her wounds, she collapses, on the verge of death. She wanders downstream, naked and unable to feed herself, for several days. Auel's time-frame, sometime between 29,950 and 26,950 years BP or 28,000 and 25,000 BCE, corresponds generally with archaeological estimates of the Neanderthal branch of mankind disappearing.Ī five-year-old girl, Ayla, who readers come to understand is Cro-Magnon, is orphaned and left homeless by an earthquake that destroys her family's camp. The novel references the advance of the polar ice sheets, setting the story before 19,950 years Before Present (BP) or 18,000 years BCE, when the farthest southern encroachment of the last glacial period of the current ice age occurred. It is the first book in the Earth's Children book series, which speculates on the possibilities of interactions between Neanderthal and modern Cro-Magnon humans. The Clan of the Cave Bear is a 1980 novel and epic work of prehistoric fiction by Jean M.

Clan of the cave bear book series