and how did she come to write this series?
Jean
Marie Untinen was born February 18, 1936 in Chicago, Illinois. She is
the second of five children. Her father was a housepainter. After high
school she married Ray Bernard Auel and raised five children of her own.
In 1964 she became a member of Mensa.
She earned her masters degree in 1976 - attending night school while working
for a Portland electronics firm. At that time she quit her job in order
to find 'more suitable work'.
Three months later she still hadn't found a new job that suited her. About
that time she got an idea for a short story about a prehistoric girl.
According to Jean, "The 'short story' led me to do some research; the
research fired my imagination, and the wealth of material made me decide
to write a novel. The first draft turned out to be more than 450,000 words
and fell into six parts. On rewriting, I realized each of these six parts
was a novel in itself. I have used that rough draft as the outline for
the series." 1
She proceeded with work on the
first novel. She rewrote the whole thing four times and some parts twenty
to thirty times until she was satisfied with the end result. This was
in September 1978. She had a hard time finding a publisher to take on
the series, given the large task ahead - with five more novels pending.
In September 1980 when The Clan of the Cave Bear finally saw
the light of day it was an instant success. Within a month more than 100,000
copies sold, after which it was on the best-seller lists for eight more
months.
The story takes place around 35,000 to 25,000 years ago in the late pleistocene epoch (the Ice Age) in prehistoric Europe. It is about a Cro-Magnon girl named Ayla and her interaction with Neandertals, her environment, and finally with other Cro-Magnon people.
Jean's extensive research has
taken her to prehistoric sites in France, Austria, Czechoslovakia, the
Ukraine, the Soviet Union, Hungary, and Germany (to follow a portion of
the Danube for the 4th novel).
She has learned, through
various sources, how to knapp flint, construct snow caves, tan hides,
gather and prepare wild foods, medicinal plants and herbs. She worked
with the Malheur Field Station in the high desert steppe country of central
Oregon and took Aboriginal Life Skills classes from anthropologist and
instructor, Jim Riggs. Jim taught her how a fire is made, how a spear-thrower
is used, how bulrushes make sleeping mats, how to pressure-flake a stone
tool, and how to squish deer brains to turn deer hide into velvety soft
leather. She worked with professionals in many different fields and countries
to gain firsthand knowledge of recent discoveries and new theories. In
1990, after Plains of Passage was published, Waldenbooks interviewed
her in France, where she had gone to study Cro-Magnon painted caves
- research for the fifth book.
"These people were the first modern humans. It's fairly well accepted
by most of the archaeological community that they had the same range of
intelligence and the same psychological and emotional reactions as we
have, except that theirs were directed in different ways. We could not
have lived in their world and they would have trouble adapting to ours.
What I was trying to show is that just because prehistory seemed to be
a 'simpler time', that doesn't mean that prehistoric man did not need
a great deal of intelligence, knowledge and wisdom to survive." 2
Future plans: "I've been working 17 years on this project, and I want to do something else--maybe a mystery, or a thin little literary science fiction book, or something. But, I admit, I've learned a lot. I love the research. I can't think of anything more fun than learning anything I want and earning a living writing about it the way I want to." 1
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