The Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean Auel
with commentary from The Cave Bear Story, by Björn Kurtén
***
By Ursus, I thought I’d found it – Ursus spelaeus, that is, the missing link, I hoped, between Jean Auel’s 1980
spear-swashing prehistoric romance, The Clan of the Cave Bear and Björn Kurtén’s near-contemporary
prehistoric writings, including his The
Cave Bear Story: Life and Death of a Vanished Animal.
It first seemed too much of a coincidence that Auel’s first
book and one of Finnish scientist Kurtén’s slim and all too rare works of fiction,
Dance of the Tiger, were both near
contemporaries of each other with almost mirror image plots. Both described the
adoption of modern human children into groups of Neandertals (or Neanderthals –
the pronunciation is the same) during the great Ice Ages. Unfortunately,
further investigation showed that Kurtén’s work didn’t appear in English until
1980, the same year Auel’s more massive book. So unless she wrote like the
wind. . . But no, it wasn’t going to
work.
Maybe, I thought, searching the catalog of the Dallas Public
Library, there was some earlier writing of Kurtén’s that Auel had referenced.
Could it be his nonfiction, The Cave Bear
Story, available in English by 1976? No, again. In fact, Kurtén completely
demolishes the title myth of Auel’s book – ritualistic worship of the gigantic
extinct cave bears by a clan of Neanderthals (or any humans, for that matter).
Most modern paleontologists agree with Kurtén. And to think
what a lovely central motif Auel’s brand of cave bear worship made. What reader
could forget the great gathering of Neanderthal clans in The Clan of the Cave Bear, a gathering at which the great bear is
killed and eaten. Or the sacramental, males-only accidentally observed by Auel’s
human heroine, Ayla, which confers her with shamanistic powers.
Not that Auel went completely out on a limb with the
bear-god idea. The myth’s source lay in the early 20th century
discovery by Emil Bächler at Drachenloch (Dragon’s Lair) Cave in the Swiss
Alps. Located at an altitude that would
have made it accessible only during an interglacial period coinciding with the Neanderthals’ early existence in Europe, the cave contained great numbers of cave bear remains,
including skulls and leg bones. “To his surprise,” Kurtén writes, “Bächler came
to realize that the skulls and bones . . . seemed to be oriented rigidly in
certain preferred directions. Could they have been deliberately placed there by
man?”
Unfortunately for Bächler’s theory, he took no photographs,
and what appeared to him to be human artifacts were destroyed during a later
excavation. His own sketches, published in 1923 and 1940, contradict both
each other and his written descriptions. Finally, there is no surviving
evidence for any human occupation of the cave other than brief occasional
visits by individuals or small groups.
But what about the alignment of the bones? Wasn’t that of
human origin?
“It is evident that repeated pushing (by successive waves of
hibernating bears) of such elongate objects as skulls, jaws, and long bones
into niches or along walls will inevitably tend to align them in the same
direction,” Kurtén writes, “. . . while skulls in the middle of the cave floor
will be trampled to fragments. . . ”
And Auel’s image of the mostly vegetarian cave bears as
benign guiding spirits? “The African buffalo is also a complete vegetarian, but
he does not impress one as docile,” Kurtén reports wryly. Tellingly, his books
are not among the references Auel’s lists on her website.
I’ve read all of Auel’s books, devouring
such tidbits as how people could boil water before the invention of waterproof
vessels (pottery or metal). Or herbal use, or tool making, or leather tanning,
or how to hunt a wooly rhinoceros. If she writes another book, as is sometimes
rumored, I’ll read it too. But for reference material, I’ll take Kurtén.
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