Free Lives in Ruins by Marilyn Johnson Page B

also a cave lion, all of which obey her perfectly. And though her Neandertal rescuers view her as ugly, she is beautiful, naturally, with cascading yellow hair * and a body that won’t quit. (“Oh! mother! oh Doni!” her lover Jondalar often exclaims, invoking the female deity.) Like Ayla, Jondalar istall, blond, and well-built, with blue eyes the color of a glacier. * A little Aryan, maybe?
    The series runs for more than four thousand pages of pelt-ripping—182 hours on audio—but I couldn’t stop. I found Dolní Věstonice woven into a story about a despotic leader who poisons a trio of young people, and an elder with a partially paralyzed face who helps bring down the despot. I read soliloquies about how great it is to have fat in the diet—always welcome news. (If the ancients visited our world, they would be astonished by smart-phones and drone warfare—and our fat-free diets.) I stayed with Auel long enough to see Ayla the mighty hunter face down a vicious wolverine, armed only with the spear-thrower she had helped invent, while her baby clung to her back. Jean Auel brought us into this dangerous world, but we’re with Ayla, whose competence and courage and intelligence tame most of the challenges in her path. The occasional startling image, like the description of Ayla’s Neandertal guardian, reminds us what a difference 25,000 years make: “Her hair was snow white; her face, dried parchment stretched over bones with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. She looked a thousand years old. She was just past twenty-six.” Boom!
    Auel’s books, author interviews, and lectures all pay tribute to her authoritative sources. Paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersall sat onstage with Auel at the Museum of Natural History in New York soon after the publication of her series’ sixth and final book. “For thirty years [Jean Auel has] entranced an audience of millions of people,” Tattersall said, introducing her. “Anybody who’s trying to re-create these vanished worlds with any claim of credibility has to have done their homework. That’s where paleoanthropology is very fortunate. . . . Jean has done her homework, and very diligently indeed.” Chris Stringer, a renowned anthropologist and Homo neanderthalensis expert, appeared with Auel at the Natural History Museum in London. He wasn’t as effusive as Tattersall, but he did look astonished when Auel said she had tanned a deer’s hide with its own brains. “The author did her homework, you have to give her that,” one archaeologist told me, echoing Tattersall. If you want to know about ancient herbology, butchering a mammoth, making sanitary napkins out of mouflon (wild sheep) wool, or badgers’ anal glands, Auel could tell you. And she has “given back a lot,” as Tattersall noted; among other things, she and her husband hosted a symposium in 1993 near Portland, Oregon, where, according to Archaeology , “an international gathering of scholars gave talks on Paleolithic symbolism and enjoyed Dom Pérignon and Château d’Yquem from the Auels’ cellar.”
    But resentment among archaeologists of Auel’s success and the privilege that came with it was inevitable. It wasn’t just about her money. “What drove people crazy,” one archaeologist told me, “was that she’d go to the South of France and be welcomed at all these sites. She got to handle what some of us would have killed to handle.” He sat in the audience at one of her talks—“seven male archaeologists and fifteen hundred women.” It was a tough evening for the guys, I gathered. On the one hand, here was an author who had single-handedly obliterated the image of the primitive, brutish caveman, and conjured instead a brilliant, adaptive action heroine. Like Shea and other scholars of ancient humans, Auel believed inthe sophisticated ancestor. And look at all those