Free Lives in Ruins by Marilyn Johnson Page A

who, with his wife, had unearthed the Neandertal man killed in a rockslide at Shanidar and supposedly buried with flowers. “In life he was blind in one eye and lame and one of his arms had been amputated at the elbow. Here’s my old man with a crippled arm! He really existed!” Auel devised a set of questions—“How dida Neandertal caveman, who was half blind, one-armed, and lame, survive to be an old man? What did he have to offer [to the other Neandertals]? Who amputated his arm, who stopped the bleeding, controlled the shock?”—then worked out the answers in the course of her first novel. Her Neandertal, she concluded, was a respected shaman, looked after by his sister, a skilled medicine woman. They stumbled upon the orphaned Ayla, obviously one of “the others,” but took pity and adopted her into the clan. When the shaman’s sister died, Ayla laid a wreath of medicinal flowers on her body in tribute. In her acknowledgments, Auel wrote how moved she had been by Ralph Solecki’s work and apologized “for one instance of literary license I took with his facts for the sake of my fiction. In real life, it was a Neanderthal who put flowers in the grave.” *
    Clearly, Auel had read archaeologists besides Solecki, some of whom argued that the great caves where prehistoric art has been found were seasonal gathering places for far-flung tribes, and others who have described Neandertals’ bone damage from close-range hunting that looked much like the bone damage of rodeo cowboys. She studied cognitive-science papers to devise a language for the Neandertals, assuming that their vocalizations would sound more guttural than those of Homo sapiens , and she gave them gruntlike names, like Uba, Goov, Creb, Broud. Artifacts found in European and Middle Eastern sites appear in her books, like the ubiquitous Venus figures, which she took as indicators of an earth-mother-centered religion shared by even far-flung bands of Homo sapiens . She sought out archaeologists with a particular expertise in artifacts like baskets and textiles that disintegrate relatively quickly, leaving little trace of ancient women’s work. Auel knew that these two different peoples, Neandertal and Homo sapiens , overlapped for perhaps 10,000 years in Europe(50,000 years or longer in the Middle East), and might have had contact, though there is no archaeological evidence of it. So she devised a storyline that kept them at a hostile distance yet gave them plenty of dramatic opportunities to interact.
    In Auel’s hands, Ayla becomes a kind of ambassador between the slow, tough, paternalistic Neandertals, and the flexible, innovative, woman-centered Homo sapiens . After the death of her protectors, Ayla is cast out by the clan and lives alone in a remote valley until the traveler named Jondalar reintroduces her to the world of Homo sapiens . Jondalar’s people, who despise and fear Neandertals as “flatheads” and “animals,” have difficulty believing Ayla’s stories that their grunts and gestures constitute language and that their society is as complex and elaborate as their own. Ayla alone understands that both genera are people, children of the Earth. She is the first populist.
    Auel telescopes thousands of years of human evolution through her heroine. ( Ayla , Auel —coincidence?) Ayla masters arithmetic and multiple languages and invents animal domestication, horseback riding, spear-throwing, sewing with bone needles, and starting fires with flint. (Auel gives another character credit for inventing pottery and soap.) Ayla is also a formidable hunter and an awesome cook. She is a healer and can set bones, administer herbal anesthesia, concoct hallucinogenic cocktails, prevent pregnancy, and cure hangovers. She even discovers Lascaux cave, and finds the artist to paint it. And there’s more! She whistles birds down from the air and tames not just horses and a wolf, but