#The Ayla's parents' colleagues characters are both women so they'd have trouble making contact with the Clan

[shwoo]

Ooh, that's good too! I was thinking that the earthquake at the end of the first book could also be time travel related (Because now there's two people with future DNA), but that one's depicted more realistically. Ukraine is pretty tectonically stable, but I think Crimea, where the story is set, is somewhat more earthquakey than the rest of it.

So you know Clan of the Cave Bear? It’s a 1980 novel by Jean M Auel about a little girl in Paleolithic Ukraine who is raised by Neanderthals. The Neanderthals call her Ayla, which is their best attempt at pronouncing her birth name, and by the end of the book she seems to have forgotten what it originally was.

We see the disaster that orphaned her in the beginning of the book, but she gets amnesia soon after, and her birth family never appear on the page. We know that she lived with her mother, that her mother was blonde, that at least one other person lived with them, and there’s one line that implies she also lived with her father. And she could swim well, because they had to cross a lot of rivers, and bridges weren’t really a thing yet.

So anyway my not-totally-serious theory is that her family is from the future. Here’s my reasoning, sorted in ascending order by how convincing I think they are!

Note: I refer to modern humans as just “humans” here, because the only other way I can think of to distinguish them from Neanderthals is calling them H. sapiens sapiens, and that takes too long to say, and also sounds pretty clinical. So when I say humans, I specifically mean modern humans, not anything in the Homo genus.

-Ayla has blonde hair and blue eyes thousands of years before those traits seem to have evolved in humans. That argument works really well for the first book, before any other humans have appeared, but it falls apart the second Jondalar appears and the narration won’t shut up about his blue eyes, and to a lesser extent, his blond hair. Giving humans of that time period blond hair and blue eyes probably seemed a lot more plausible in 1980, when the book was published. Still, though. It got me thinking.

-One of the small bits of information we do get about Ayla’s birth family is that after they died, “She had nowhere to go and she had no one who would come and look for her.” Why do they have so little contact with the outside world that the narrator knows nobody will look for them? They live in a lean-to, so there’s not very many of them, so where did they come from, and why don’t they have ties to their parent group anymore? Also, I’m sure I remember reading a line where one of the Neanderthals talks about how humans don’t normally come this far south, although I can’t find it at the moment. Even if I made that up, the closest humans do appear to live several months travel to the north, based on the second and third books. Ayla’s family lived in the middle of nowhere, with no other people to turn to, for no explained reasons.

-Ayla doesn’t have anything to eat after her birth family’s deaths. She tries eating a leaf, but it’s bitter, so she spits it out and doesn’t try anything else in the days she’s wandering alone. I don’t expect a five-year-old to be an expert at foraging or anything, but it’s weird that she doesn’t recognise anything at all as being potentially edible. Did her family never take her on gathering trips, or prepare food where she could see, or give her anything recognisable as something that grew out of the ground? They didn’t have to be actively teaching her or anything, especially since it turns out she’s super smart at foraging when she does start paying attention. It’s almost like she’s never had any reason before to associate the edible plants in the area with food.

-One of the most memorable thing about the later books, other than all the sex, is the way Ayla invents a ridiculous amount of new technology. She invents surgical stitches, the sewing needle (in different books), animal taming, horseback riding, the travois, the spear thrower (with Jondalar), the fire striker, and the idea that sex makes babies. She also has a great memory, allowing her to learn foreign languages and customs very quickly. This is explained as being something she had to develop to keep up with the Neanderthals and their genetic memories, but I have a different theory. Towards the end of the Clan of the Cave Bear, Ayla participates in a genetic memory ceremony led by her adoptive father, Creb, who is so good at having genetic memories that he can psychically guide other people through theirs. She obviously has them as well, or it wouldn’t have worked, but she can’t consciously access them like the Neanderthals can. So maybe she invented all those things because her ancestors already knew about them, and what Creb did allowed her to remember on her own sometimes? It’s a stretch, but I still find this more believable than Ayla inventing everything and learning languages in a week because she’s just that amazing.

-When Ayla is five, Creb shows her how to count, something the Neanderthals see as a special magic that only super genius shamans like Creb could grasp. Ayla not only understands immediately, she also does some simple arithmetic. That’s a lot of abstract concepts to understand at once without training, especially for a five-year-old. Modern kids spend so much time learning basic mathematical concepts for a reason. And in the sequel, it’s mentioned that Jondalar’s culture also consider counting to be magic, and usually leave it to their shaman, although Jondalar is also capable of doing some arithmetic with difficulty. Jondalar is twenty-one at this point and used to be in a relationship with the shamaniest shaman in all of Ice Age France, so that makes a little more sense. Who is teaching five-year-olds about arithmetic in Ice Age Ukraine?

-Ayla likes it when her half-Neanderthal son calls her “mama”, because it reminds her of something that makes her want to cry. This implies that she called her own mother “mama”, like in a lot of Indo-European languages, including English. It’s not totally unbelievable, because it’s pretty common for languages to have words for parents that babies can easily say, but it’s still very strange that it was that combination of sounds in particular.  And it doesn’t feel like in the second book when Ayla is learning Zelandonii and it’s rendered as English. It’s just a sound Ayla and Durc make that the Neanderthals don’t, that seems to be the same way she referred to her mother.

-I mentioned the genetic memory ceremony with Creb earlier, but I didn’t go into detail: Basically Ayla took some drugs, (She’d made too much and didn’t know how to safely dispose of it without upsetting the spirits or something), and wandered into the shamanistic ceremony it was meant for. Creb notices her, and uses his psychic powers to give her a mental tour of human evolution. Right at the end, after Creb has had to stop guiding her because they don’t share their more recent genetic memories, she briefly sees the present day. It’s described as accidentally overshooting, but that’s not really consistent with the rest of the book. How can Ayla remember things that haven’t happened yet? There must be a physical basis for the genetic memories, because their accumulation is given as a reason for why the Neanderthals had bigger heads than humans. So it can’t be an entirely spiritual thing. If Ayla saw planes and skyscrapers as part of her genetic memory drug trip, it’s because her ancestors saw it. This could also tie into why Creb was so depressed after this, and what made him so sure the Neanderthals had no future: He’d seen enough of Ayla’s future memories to understand that they basically didn’t, except in the form of hybrids like Ayla’s son.

So here’s what I think happened, based on not very much: A married couple went back in time to study the Neanderthals, which explains why they were in Neanderthal territory, and either had a daughter or took their daughter with them. The earthquake that killed them was not a normal earthquake. Normal earthquakes don’t open up fissures large enough to be described as an abyss, they don’t close again afterwards, and I don’t see any reason for them to smell like rot, or to burp after swallowing people. That was a supernatural event brought on by things existing in a time they weren’t supposed to be in. Probably doesn’t bode well for Ayla, or for Durc or Jonayla.

All this kind of ruins the “Ayla as the future of humanity” theme the Clan of the Cave Bear has running through it, but it’s fun to think about.