In this episode, we meet the clan, ponder the significance of the totem spirits, and question the effectiveness of Brun’s leadership - but who are we to quibble, after all we’re just women!

References:

A Short History of the World According to Sheep, by Sally Coulthard, 2020

The Carrier Bag of Fiction Theory, by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1989

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Evolution, by Cat Bohannon, 2025

Prehistoric Book Club is hosted by Steph and Kat, two old friend doing a deep dive into the Earth's Children books by Jean M. Auel. Season One covers The Clan of The Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel, 1980

Theme Music: Sanskrit, courtesy iMovie/Apple.

Steph: You found Prehistoric Book Club.

Set down your hand axe, light a fire in your hearth, and settle in with Stefan Cat for a close read of Clan of the Cave Bear.

Kat: Welcome to Prehistoric Book Club, Episode two. We are talking about chapter two of Clan of the Cave Bear. By by Jean M Auel. I'm Kat. I'm Steph.

Steph: In our first episode, we did chapter one and the sort of acknowledgments, and now we are really diving in with chapter two. So I'll start with a little summary of the chapter.

We meet a clan of 20 people who are walking together and they find a young girl, the girl from our first chapter,

lying unconscious by the side of a river.

And at first,

the men at the front of this group, they pass her by, but a woman who's about 19 years old notices that she's still alive and it gets permission to pick her up and take her with them.

And over the course of the next sort of few pages, as she's being carried, we meet a few members of this group of 20 people.

We meet Brun,

who is the leader.

Sometimes I call him Brun in my head, sometimes Brun. Anyway, Brun is the leader.

Iza is a woman who heals and is related to Brun. And then we meet Creb, who is an old man with some serious deformities, who is also a sibling of Isa and Brun.

And we meet Grod, who is another sort of second in command in this group, and Ebra. So we get a few names, but basically these people are on the move because their home,

their cave home, was destroyed by the same earthquake that we assume killed our little girl's mother. And they are walking and looking for a new place to live. And in fact, we get a ceremony that Creb the magician leads,

where the men get together and are begging the spirits that they worship to help them find a new home. So we learn a little bit about their lifestyle and how they live.

And they have taken the little girl with them and she is being healed by Isa.

Kat: I think it's really interesting that we're moving from one earthquake story to another earthquake story that this entire group, we find out that they lost six people.

Six people died in the earthquake at their old cave,

including Iza's husband,

though she doesn't seem heartbroken about it.

Steph: He sounds like a real douche.

Kat: He sounds like a douche. It sounds like time off for good behavior on Iza's side.

Steph: Yeah, we get a lot of info real quick about.

About these people, even just from the description of Iza Right. She's. She's about four and a half feet tall.

She's kind of stocky. She has bow legs. She's 19 and pregnant. And old.

Kat: Old.

Steph: So old to be having a baby. This is a geriatric pregnancy.

Kat: Absolutely.

Steph: It's just described as having a beaky nose and a prognathous jaw, which I looked up what that meant,

and it's one of those words that you really only say about Jaws, you know, because I was like, why don't we see this word about other things? It's. That's because it's.

It's a jaw word. It means that it juts forward.

And we're told that she's so maybe a bit hairier than we would think of people being.

Guess what? These are all hints that we're supposed to pick up on. I think that Isa and her friends are a bit different from you and me.

Kat: And her spoiler alert. Low forehead.

Steph: Yeah, her low forehead.

Kat: A long, large head resting on a short, thick neck.

Steph: Yeah.

So this is. So this is our Neanderthals that we are finally meeting this. But they obviously don't call themselves that.

They call themselves clan.

And this little clan is 20 people, but used to be 26.

Right away we get that it's an extremely hierarchical society with just even what order people are walking in.

Kat: Yeah. Which I personally would find it so difficult to maintain.

Steph: Yeah. Just like, be like, I want to walk a little faster. I wish these guys would hurry up.

Kat: I want to go look at this thing.

What do you mean? Everybody behind me has to stop and wait while I wander off to look at a pretty branch on a tree.

Steph: And that, you know, that this is tied to that. It's tied to status. So, like, Ebra is the second highest status woman in this group,

and she's like, jealous and mad about our friend Isa,

who has status of her own as a medicine woman, being allowed to rock in front of her. So status is super important.

And it's something that they're constantly aware of and thinking about. And that there's jealousies over. It is all established right here at the very beginning.

And also that Eza wants to rescue the girl, but she can't do that without sort of permission from the men in the group, and particularly from Brun, who's the leader,

who doesn't exactly give her. He just doesn't forbid her from taking her. That seems to be important. It's not. He doesn't say, yes, you can take her. He says, well, I won't stop you from taking her.

So he really avoids any responsibility for anything.

Kat: There is a nice line about him there when he's trying to figure it out.

And you get a sense of just how much is on his shoulders as the leader who is in a very lonely place in this hierarchy because there's nobody he can really even talk to.

He's lost six members of his clan. He's lost their home. He doesn't know if the spirits are mad at them. He doesn't know how to make the spirits not mad at them.

Like, would the spirits be angry if esa's totem is upset that he doesn't let Isa do this thing she wants to do?

Steph: You basically get a sense that, like,

Brun is sort of constantly tortured by the idea that there are these bigger forces that want him to do something a certain way and that he has no access to asking them about it.

So he's constantly trying to guess whether, like,

how to interpret sort of esoteric signals from the spirit world,

which,

listen, makes for, like, an interesting character. But I do find it frustrating because it doesn't feel very tenable to me that you would have a group of 20 people who are all reliant on one guy who spends most of his time in his head going, I don't know what this symbol means.

Right?

Kat: Like,

what are the spirits saying? And who's bad?

And are we supposed to think this about Brun?

Is this him in crisis,

or is this how he is all the time,

and we don't know yet how he's going to be? Is he gonna agonize over every tiny little decision?

This seems like a fairly big decision to him. It also feels dead simple.

Found an injured child,

pick it up.

Like, that feels dead simple.

It's certainly very easy for Isa.

Steph: Yeah. Isa has no problem.

She doesn't wrestle with the idea of, like, are the spirits telling me to do this or not?

She reaches for her amulet. Like, there's an interesting moment where she reaches for the amulet necklace that she wears when she first sees the child.

And she's, like, not even sure herself whether it's for protection or whether to check in on what she should do. So, you know, we're getting this picture of, like, a people that have this sense that they need to check in with these sort of spirit guides or spiritual spirits that they worship on how they should behave.

But, you know, Iza's definitely not tying herself in knots about it. But again, you know,

she's not in charge of finding them a new cave. And I can understand that Bruna's under a lot of pressure,

but it is, you know, an early window into the fact that he does this a lot.

Kat: He is maybe has some hard time making quick decisions.

Steph: And it's one of those interesting things in writing where, like, you know, they always say show, don't tell, right? So we're being shown that Bruin has a hard time making quick decisions and feels sort of tortured by trying to interpret the world of the spirits and what they may want from him.

But we're told constantly that he's a great leader.

But actually,

as a re-reader of this book, I'm like, is he, though,

what

Kat: is it that we want from a leader? Do we want a leader who can make quick decisions or do we want a leader who flip flops until he comes down on something?

This one really feels like he ends up making the decision that will make his sister the least upset.

And he's pretty sure the child's gonna die anyway.

Steph: For the sake of our book and everything we need to happen, he has to make this decision. Cause if they just keep walking. Very short book.

Kat: Just coming back to the hierarchy stuff again. Immediately after this,

we have the women who have all stopped because if Isa is stopped, then everyone behind her is stopped.

But of course, we're also getting this.

They're clearly gossiping,

they're clearly trying to figure out what is going on.

But we're getting a big clue here on what's happening. It is their hands flying in rapid motion at one another that. But they are clear, clearly this is gossip central.

What has she picked up?

Why has she been allowed to.

What is going on?

They're at the back of the line in knowing what's going on. And we figure. What if we figure the earthquake was six, seven, eight days ago.

They have been walking for a while,

quite a lot of them carrying children or pregnant and the women carrying everything.

Steph: And. And even, like, even in Bryn's little decision about whether, like, well,

she's a woman,

she's just a woman, right? That's like literally his thought. She's a medicine woman. That's going to be important. But she's just a woman.

So very quickly we're getting the sense that this is a strict hierarchy. It's a strict patriarchal hierarchy. Obviously really important for. For this book,

but a bit of a bummer.

Kat: It doesn't feel quite like the society we want our little girl ending up in.

She seems to have some spirit and some feistiness and it doesn't really seem like there's a place for that.

But time will tell.

I have a question for you.

Steph: Yeah.

Kat: Before we move on too much further, though,

because you were talking about this a little while ago related to something entirely different.

Fleece from wild sheep gathered from thorny shrubs when the muffins were shedding.

Yeah. Is one of the materials they're using in diapers.

Steph: So they're using wool.

Yeah. To pack,

like. Yeah. I love that we get a whole, like, aside about how they deal with poopy babies right away.

Like,

you know, this was written by a woman. She's like, don't worry.

Even though they didn't have diapers, they had a solution. You just pick your baby up. You could feel that they were about to ****. You just knew it. And you picked them up and you took them out and you just held them out and they pooped all over the ground.

And then you stuffed some sheep's wool in their butt.

So, yeah, what. What Kat's talking about is I'm a big knitter. I'm really into to sort of fiber arts and wool in particular.

So I was listening to an audiobook about the history of the world from the point of view of sheep,

not themselves, but, like,

taking care of them.

And so early on,

you know, sheep would basically lose their,

Their coat, sort of the way a dog sheds. Right. Like, seasonally, when it got hot,

and that would catch on spiky plants. And so humans would go and find that and grab that and use it to make cord. You could twist it or anything absorbent and stuff like that.

So that's what she's talking about here.

So, you know, sort of many, many thousands of years later, someone will be like, well, what if we kept these sheep with us? And then we'd know where their wool was when we want it instead of having to go find it.

But in this case, they're still just picking it up where they find it.

Kat: But modern sheep don't shed.

Steph: That's right. So we did two things to sheep. First, we made them shed a lot, I think. Or shed it. Like,

we had a point where we wanted them to shed. So then we would go and get it all from where it would get caught on trees and stuff. And then someone was like, well, but then they could go lose their wool on somebody else's land.

And then. I don't get it.

So then we started breeding them not to drop it at all.

And then we invented scissors. Well, shears.

So basically, before we had a good way of shearing them, we wanted them to drop their wool More so that we could get more of it.

So we bred that and then we turned around and bred it the other way when we realized that, like, somebody was getting free wool and that can't stand.

So now we have these sheep. It's like, especially merino that can't lose any. Like, they can't shed at all. So we have to shear them or eventually the weight of their own wool will kill them.

But apparently there is sort of a move back towards sheep that can drop their. Their wool on their own in some of like sort of Shetland sheep and some of the soil sheep and stuff to try and get back to something where the shearing isn't such a big part of taking care of them.

Anyway. This has become a small sidestep into the history of sheep podcast.

But there you go. So, like,

um.

But I think it's, you know, it's cool that, like, she's mentioning this stuff right away. Like all of these little hints that she's dropping. These are all things, a lot of things that become part of agriculture and domestication later on.

Right. She's. It's not by accident that she's mentioning this stuff.

Yeah, well.

Kat: And you can see the value in having something that would work on a baby, on a wound on,

to make cording out of.

This is a valuable little thing. They're gathering where they find it.

Steph: This is a society that doesn't have pottery yet. So how do you carry things?

Kat: I pulled off the shelf this morning before we were going to start talking, because this chapter reminded me of this book.

This is Ursula Le Guin, the carrier bag of fiction theory.

And she talks in it about storytelling as a bag. But she's also talking about how a way of carrying things is almost certainly the first thing that we ever invented as a species that long before anything else.

I'm just going to read you a couple of lines here.

It's hard to tell. A really gripping tale of how I rested a wild oat seed from its husk.

And then another, and then another,

and then another and then another.

And then I scratched my gnat bites and Ool said something funny and we went to the creek and got a drink and watched newts for a while. And then I found another patch of oats.

No, it does not compare. It cannot compete with how I thrust my spear deep into the titanic hairy flank while Oobe impaled one huge sweeping tusk,

writhing and screaming and blood sprouting everywhere in a crimson torrent.

And **** was crushed to jelly when the mammoth fell on him. And I shot my unearing arrow straight through the eye to the brain.

That story not only has action, it has a hero.

Heroes are powerful. Before you know it,

the men and women in the wild oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs and the singers are all a part of it,

have all been pressed into service in the tale of the hero. But it isn't their story.

It's his.

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you.

Even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat.

You may put as many as you can in your mouth while they're handy, that being the primary container. But what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and it's raining?

And wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little oomph to make her shut up? But how do you get more than one stomach full and one handful home?

So you have to get up and go to the **** soggy oat patch in the rain. And wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put baby Oo in so that you could pick up the oats with both hands?

A leaf, a gourd, a shell, a net, a bag, a sling, a sack, a bottle, a box, a container, a holder, a recipient.

The first cultural device was probably a recipient.

Steph: I'm sold makes sense to me, and it feels very much.

Kat: And we're seeing.

We're getting so many mentions in this chapter of the women and their little pockets that they're putting things into that they've rigged up the hides they're wearing and their belts in such a way to create all of these pockets.

Steph: And today we have women on Instagram going, look at this dress. It has pockets. It's like, we're still excited about it,

Kat: but the thing that we really want and need all the way through this, something to put something in.

Steph: The other thing that happens in this chapter is we get our first glimpse of the otterhide bag,

the medicine bag.

I was like, oh,

it's like, you know how they say in Sex and the City, New York is the fifth character.

In Clan of the Cave Bear, the otterhide bag is a character as well.

So Isa is getting ready to treat some of the little girl's wounds, and she gets out this bag that she's got on her, you know, on a thong around her waist, and it's a whole otter that's been like that.

The head is now the flap of the bag. So it's like, blah. And then you reach into its throat, and all the stuff is inside,

and

Kat: it still has its hands and feet.

Steph: Yeah.

Kat: So it's been emptied through that neck hole.

Steph: If you've read the books before,

you know this bag will be with us to the bitter end. It's still. We still have a bag like this. It's not the same one, but it's very. It is this kind of bag.

So it was. I was excited. I was like, ooh, a celebrity making an early appearance.

Kat: The celebrity bag of prehistory. It is the. The Birkin of the Stone Age. The Stone Age Birkin.

Steph: But there's a lot of walking in this chapter. Some forag, but we got to talk about Creb.

Kat: We do.

Steph: So Isa mentioned. Where do we get.

Kat: Start with crib.

Steph: So he appears on page 14 in my book. But basically. So he. He comes. So Es has gotten permission from Brun, and she's got the child, and the. The ladies have had a little gossip.

And then this man walks up to her.

He's described as an old man past 30. He hobbles up to her.

He doesn't carry any. Anything, no weapon. Only a long staff to help him walk.

And his right leg, she says, was crippled and smaller than the left. Yet he managed to move with surprising agility.

And his right shoulder and upper arm were atrophied. And the shriveled arm had been amputated below the elbow.

The powerful shoulder and arm and leg muscles had fully developed his left side, making him appear lopsided.

And his huge cranium was even larger than those of the rest of the clan.

And the difficulty of his birth had caused the defect that crippled him for life.

We're gonna hear the word crippled a lot, I gotta tell you.

Yeah,

it's not my favorite, but it's used here a lot to describe Kreb, and not with any sort of sense of derision,

but we'll try and avoid it.

But he's. He's definitely has a number of birth defects. And then it seems also he lost his eye.

We find out that one of his eyes is gone. So some of these injuries also may be from later in his life.

But I think the big news is he's old and he's been through all this stuff, and yet he lives. Right. And this is,

at the time that this is published,

big news that, you know, early humans would have taken care of somebody who was born that way.

Kat: Yes. And ancient. He is 30 years old. Can you imagine?

Steph: Turns out that he is.

Not only is he not like the lowest ranked guy, he's pretty high up there. He is a magician, the Mogur Mogur. How are we saying that?

Kat: Mogur Mogur. Okay, yeah.

Steph: Mogur.

He basically is the shaman of this group. He is the one who communicates with the spirits on behalf of this group.

And he also is Isa and Bryn's older brother.

Kat: Yes.

And as firstborn,

would have been leader if he had been born whole and healthy. And it's unclear if we really thought that, but for his affliction,

he would have been leader.

So it's unclear whether or not the thinking was when he was born that he wouldn't live.

We know he was born to a medicine woman because Eza was.

And they share a mother,

Steph: but she survived his birth. To have two more kids is pretty impressive.

Kat: Have two more kids.

And we are maybe seeing here part of Brune's never feeling like he might be quite up to the job that he is.

He is a second son.

Steph: Yeah. But I don't know, this whole idea of, like, he doesn't have anyone to talk to. Why don't you talk to your brother, dude? Like, you have a brother who is really smart,

who also is a leader.

You guys could chat.

But anyway, that's not my business.

I'm just a woman.

When Isa's done taking care of the men and taking care of others, she's allowed to go and take care of the little girl.

And it turns out Kreb is pretty curious about the little girl too. And sort of there's a sense that this is a side of him that even Isa hasn't really seen before.

His interest and care for the injured girl.

We also get the information here that he. No one's allowed to ask Isa about her medicine really directly. Like, there's all these sort of subtleties of things you're not supposed to say and questions you're not allowed to ask.

And women don't have a lot of rights there, but she does. She's allowed, like, you're not allowed to say, like, hey, Isa, what's in this?

She. She doesn't have to tell you. You shouldn't even ask.

Kat: Yeah, and it's the. Shouldn't even ask because she. She's not allowed to lie if asked.

And.

And we learn at some point that they're not particularly good liars.

Their language doesn't really allow for it. But, yeah, it's taboo to ask her.

Steph: Taboo is like a big part of their Culture, actually, it. It comes up, and I was thinking about it throughout these next few chapters, how much taboo is built into it,

which makes sense. They live in really close quarters.

How else do you get any sense of privacy?

So Crab is, like, sniffing around, like, hey, whatcha making?

And she's like, just some stuff to help the kid. But I think why it's important is we get a sense of how. Of Isa's great expertise. She really knows her stuff,

and that. That this is an area that she is allowed to exercise some control over and doesn't have to do just what she's told.

We're about to find out that Krebs gonna do this ritual with men and that they've been doing it every night since they lost their home. So they're, like,

basically having a whole. Having a hallucinogenic trip every night as they're walking a lot. It's a lot. You know, we're not even, like, half a day march in here. And already Brun's like, oh, I really shouldn't have let Isaac pick that child up.

And what is the child doing during this? I think she's out. She's in unconscious, or just about pretty much all of this time. So we really, like the character that let us in is out of the mix for now.

She's asleep.

Kat: Yeah. She is alive. And that's all we can really hope for. And not just asleep. Isa is treating her and drugging her.

Steph: Yeah. Yeah.

Kat: In a good way.

Steph: Brun is already, like, regretting his decision, but Krebs sort of steps in, is like, no, no.

If you leave her, she'll die. And enough people have died. We're not looking for more death here. Let's.

We're gonna let her keep carrying her. Uh, so they get to the end of the day, and it's time to have this ceremony.

And it's done with Datura. I think that's. We're told that it's done with Datura.

Kat: Yeah.

Steph: Which is,

you know, again, Jean's. Jean's on it. It is the right. She's correct about this medicine.

It's. It's basically an atropine.

We. We. We still use it for things today,

Kat: but maybe don't just go dig it up yourself and.

Steph: No, no. Definitely get it from a pharmacist if you can.

Kat: Yeah. If ease is not there, it's not safe.

Steph: That's right.

So this is where we get.

One of the great inventions of this book is these memories that the clan has.

So basically,

what Jean is doing here is she's suggesting that Neanderthals had a different kind of intelligence from what she calls CRO Magnon, but basically modern humans, like Homo sapiens sapiens,

and that they would have had some kind of ancestral memory,

sort of the way the birds do. Right. Of like, oh, this is where I was born, I have to fly back here. So I think that's what she's basing it off of is the idea that like there are other animals that basically have something that's more like it's beyond instinct.

It's like actual information about the world that is somehow inherited.

Kat: Yeah. And it does seem to be something that birds and butterflies and migrating animals.

Yeah,

it does, it is, it feels very alien to us as readers, but is a thing that exists in nature.

In nature.

Steph: So yeah, she says, she basically describes that these,

the people of this clan and people like them, Neanderthals would have had like a,

a memory of past stored information in their memory that they only need to be reminded of as they grow up. So it's not like it's all accessible to them at all times, but that like, you know, instead of having to tell, say, my daughter every morning to brush her teeth,

I would just tell her once and then she would always know to brush her teeth. Sounds great.

But in this case it's like, you know how to process datura or you know how to make a great spear.

But what's interesting is she has these as I'm talking about gene now the author decides that these are sex differentiated or gender differentiated memories as well, that like men remember man stuff, women remember women stuff.

They, they, they could never possibly do each other's jobs because they wouldn't have have the memories for it.

And that also that when they take this detoura and do this ceremony,

Kreb is such a powerful shaman that he can guide their memories all the way back to like single celled organism time to be like. This is what it was like when we got out of the oceans and we took our first breaths and all of this.

And that part of the ceremony is like reminding them of that, of their history all the way up to the

Kat: present, which feels wild

Steph: beyond wild. Like I. Why did she choose this, do you think? Like, why did she decide? Because this is not based on anything

Kat: in reality and it's not a thing I don't think that we really see any indication of in other primates.

Steph: No, no, this is entirely fiction. But I will tell you, when I was young and read it the first time, I was like Wait, really?

Kat: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Steph: What purpose does it serve her as a writer to introduce this idea of these memories, do you think? Like, why does she choose this?

Kat: I think two things. One,

it gives us our child as an even further outsider, that she is absolutely not of these people.

She has not just been lost by one group of humans and found by another group of similar humans,

but is in a place where she's going to have difficulty communicating, difficulty understanding.

She has a mind like ours. She doesn't have access to memories that will tell her how to do anything,

which is going to almost certainly create some sort of difficulty.

I think the other thing that is happening here is that this is Jean's theory,

or a fundamental part of her theory on the dying out of the Neanderthals.

We're getting language like they were the culmination of a branch of mankind who was brain was developed in the back of their heads in the occipital and parietal regions that control vision and bodily sensation and storm memory.

But that these are moving toward the end of a line,

that they're reliant on their memories, that they are backward looking, not forward looking, and that this is going to be a part of their downfall. Because what we know,

though the characters in the book don't know,

is that not everybody has a future.

Steph: Yes, I agree. I think that she's really interested in somehow answering the question of like, why did Neanderthals not last? Why would we go on and they die out? And also she has Creb sort of able to sense it like that.

He can't go forward in time when he does this sort of mind meld thing,

that there is no forward and he's concerned about it and apprehensive about it.

Which obviously I think is really. It's her apprehension or our apprehension. It's for us as readers to be apprehensive about right. Of like why, why did they end and why do we go on?

But yeah, it's a really.

It's a wild decision to make and I think sometimes she gets hoist on that petard. There are times where it's like that story doesn't always seem to work with the characters that she presents to us,

I find.

Kat: And certainly it puts some difficulty with Kreb in particular that they're all so reliant on these memories. But he has such a curiosity.

He's a curious man.

He's aware that he can't see the future and is curious about why he can't. He's curious about this little girl, they've found he's curious about the others in a way that most of them aren't.

And even we see in Eza, when she's picking up the little girl,

it's less. A bit more.

Less of a curiosity and more about instinct.

This is a hurt child. And this is what she does.

This is. She's.

She has skills to bring to this problem.

Steph: Yeah, it comes up in this chapter, too. It's mentioned that she's brought animals to the cave before to try and help them,

and that will come up again later.

So it's just little things like that. Like, it's one of those.

Kat: It's.

Steph: Listen, as a writer, it's a fabulous idea. You know, like I said, it didn't come from nothing. It does come from nature. It exists out there. But it's a really, like.

It's a bold move. And then you gotta kind of be watchful that it doesn't create sort of loose threads in your narrative. And I think there are times where this bothered me.

Kat: We also get, very importantly in this chapter, that they've met one of the others before.

Steph: Oh, yeah.

Kat: Or that they at least remember.

And this, I think, is a different kind of memory than the memories,

capital M, that we're talking about. When they have them,

they have sort of a living memory. They remember the story their mother told them about a man from the Others with a broken arm that her mother took care of.

So Isa's grandmother took care of a man from the Others with a broken arm.

Steph: Yeah. Who stayed with them for a time.

For a time,

yeah. So I think later on in the book, Isa sort of says, well, that's how I knew that my medicine would work on this little girl, is because I knew of this story that my grandmother had been able to help someone of the other.

So, yeah, again, going back to this idea of, like, that there are they as. As. As set in their ways really, as the memories imply. When now just. We've already got two instances of them going outside of the bounds of that in this little group and being willing to take care of someone from outside of it.

Kat: I think this is.

This is Kreb talking when he says, although mother did say it took him longer to wake up from the sleeping medicine than expected.

So that's in sort of his story he heard.

But we're also to imagine that that is in Isa's memories of how to be a medicine woman,

that when treating another,

you know,

slightly lighter on the dose,

that they can't quite handle it as Much that this grown man woke up from it.

Steph: But it took a long time.

Kat: Took a long time. So they maybe gave him quite a lot of whatever it is that they're giving.

Steph: So, obviously, the other huge thing that we learn here is that they don't articulate sounds the way that we do. Right. So on page 19 in my book, at one point, the girl wakes up a little bit and Isa's sort of trying to comfort her,

but it sounds like soft growls is what it is, what it says.

So they can't make the same sounds that we do.

And this is where I'm gonna go into a little bit of, like, history and archaeology corner.

This was widely thought to be the case when this book was written,

but it is absolutely not true.

So with more Neanderthal remains having been found and the genome having been sequenced, like the whole Neanderthal genome has been sequenced,

their vocal cords were really, really similar to ours. Not exactly as sort of huge range of sounds, but enormous. Like, for sure, they could do more than growl softly and grunt.

Jean's just going off of what was thought at the time. But it makes me think about why we wanted to think that. Right. Like,

Kat: yeah, it's an interesting thing to have decided it was part of a way of making them. Making the Neanderthals feel like animals, not like humans.

Steph: Yeah. Which is going to be a huge theme of this series. Right.

Kat: Yeah.

Steph: Dehumanizing things,

other creatures,

whether that's human or not, you know what I mean? Like, whether it's Neanderthals or whatever. But, like, especially as contrasted with the huge reverence for the animals that provide sustenance and whatever.

But, yeah, like, we, not that long ago, based on finding some toe bones, were like, oh, these people couldn't talk.

Kat: Yeah.

Steph: And then, you know, had to revise that pretty significantly.

The fact that Jean was like, yeah, well, okay, I accept that maybe they couldn't talk, that they didn't make these sounds, because you know who she'd argue with? All these scientists.

But she's like, but I bet you they talk with their hands.

And I think that's really cool. She's like, a hundred percent. They had to have communicated that you can't. Of course they communicated with this level of intelligence. Come on.

Kat: Yes,

you. Right. Of course they had to. She found a workaround,

given the science as.

As it was at the time and knew the thing that,

yeah,

of course they had to talk. They're living in community in a way

Steph: that, yeah, wouldn't be possible without communication. Just Not.

Kat: Yeah.

When Kreb is talking about their grandmother healing the man, he refers to him the man of the others, he refers to him specifically as human.

So certainly the clan understands that we are human.

That early man that looks like us,

those are human beings along with them.

This is certainly not a creature. That's a totem for anyone.

Talking is what we think makes us human. Language is this thing that we think makes us human.

So how could somebody else have had it? We were special. We're unique.

And I think we're seeing a bit of that sort of bleeding,

that that's the environment in which Jean is writing all of this. So she's got to find another way for them to talk. And you're right. The sign language is a great workaround.

Steph: Yeah. I think, overall, as we go through these books,

we're gonna come back to this idea. A lot of, like,

Jean is both inside that world of,

like, she's writing from inside this worldview of, like, we are special and the sort of destiny of Homo sapiens sapiens to. To. To create civilization and everything that we're using to make this podcast, that we were predestined to do that and that we are special.

She's writing from inside of that,

but she's also questioning it.

But she can only, like, I find she doesn't question it as hard as I would, for example, because I have information that she didn't.

Kat: Right.

Steph: 30 and 40 years ago about what we now know about Neanderthal and what we've learned about genetics and all this stuff. But I sometimes find myself, as I'm writing, like, frustrated that she's not questioning it harder.

Like, she's like. Like. Like the intense hierarchy and the intense patriarchy and all of that stuff. Like,

she's accepting that. That it must have been that way.

I think,

in a way that I find frustrating. But also the fact that she has them talking to each other with sign language and picking up a little girl is already, like, pretty incredible.

Kat: Yeah. And I don't know how she made these choices.

I don't know what other options she considered. Did she consider having them just talk and then.

And what does that do to the story she's telling?

It certainly makes the language gap smaller. It changes some of the things that happen in the future.

I, like, given the Time it was written in the sign language. Choice.

Steph: Yeah. I think I'm falling a bit, a tiny bit into the thing that happens with, like, Game of Thrones fans where they forget that it's a work of fiction written by somebody.

Like, sometimes I get.

I'm like,

but Jean, that's not how it happened.

And I had to have to remind myself that, in fact, these are all fictional characters.

The other thing that I want to get into about, like, them with their vocal cords is also,

at one point she said that they have no frontal lobes.

That's not true.

It's definitely that the frontal lobe area is smaller than ours, but absolutely, they had frontal lobes. And they did have, you know, all those connections,

just not as many.

But so, yeah, the idea that they didn't have frontal lobes is.

It's nonsense.

They were really very much like us in a lot of ways.

Kat: So just talking about language again, this is from the book Eve by Kat Bohanan.

For the vast majority of hominin history, we left little trace of our culture. So if we had a language, we weren't doing a heck of a lot of it. The soonest hominins seem to have modern vocal apparatus.

Throat, jaw and tongue in the right place is only a few hundred thousand years ago.

So that's the earliest we could have been physically capable of producing the complex vocal languages we do today.

It just took a long while to get there.

Steph: Yeah. So, again, like, obviously Jean didn't know this. This is. This is new science.

And,

you know, she did, but she did what she could to give them a world of deep intelligence that was so clearly obvious to her,

despite what the science was saying at the time. And that's awesome. And I'm. It's. It's why she was the right person for this book.

Kat: Yeah, yeah. The imagination it would take to figure this out from or to construct this from, what she knew back then is astounding.

Steph: Well, and that's it. It's like, you know, I'm picking on these little things, but overall,

I just want to make sure someone reading them today isn't like, oh, did you know Neanderthals couldn't talk? Because I just want to make sure that they don't fall into the same problem that I did of taking everything from the book as, like, obviously.

Right.

Kat: Also, you can go back in time in your mind.

Steph: Yeah. To when you were just a little

Kat: fish to when you were just a little fish. You can do it every night. It's not even exhausting.

Steph: They do get exhausted. She does say they're tired.

Kat: She does say they're tired, but they're not so tired they can't do it all over again the next day.

Steph: Yeah.

Kat: So I guess that part of the desperation.

Steph: Well, and also, you know, Nobody's really over 30 and everyone knows hangovers get worse when you're 30.

Kat: That's true. That's true. That might be the magic here.

Steph: So I think that pretty much takes us through chapter two. What did we learn? Anything that was your main takeaway from from this chapter?

Kat: I think my biggest takeaway is get your drugs from a reliable source.

Steph: Well, I learned that clover can be both food and medicine,

Which I'm sure will be helpful to me in my everyday life.

Thanks for listening to Prehistoric Book Club. Follow us on Instagram prehistoricbookclub, where we share details of any books, films or other research we've used in the show Clan of the Cave Bear and the entire Earth's Children series are available as audiobooks or get a paperback copy from Beggar's Banquet Books in case in Gananoque,

Ontario, or your favorite local bookseller. Until next time.