I Wrote a Book About Aliens. But My Favorite Ones Lived on Earth.
Reading Time: 7 minutesA lesson in humanity, from the Neanderthals of Clan of the Cave Bear., My favorite alien: How Clan of the Cave Bear got me started.
I should’ve been ready the first time someone asked me ‘What’s your favorite alien?’ I’d written a book about the ways we imagine aliens, after all, full of examples from sci-fi and science. Instead, I grasped at a blank space for an answer.
The aliens I write about in the book filed through the blank space where my answer should be. The heptapods from Arrival, unhumanoid, unearthlike, so strange they shatter and reform the human heroine’s brain; Stevland from Sue Burke’s novel Semiosis, a sentient plant who finds ways to communicate with, and strugglingly understand, the human colonists who’ve come to live on his planet; Octavia Butler’s Oankali, creepily gray and tentacled, familiar enough for the human protagonist of her Xenogenesis trilogy to speak with and love, but eventually irrevocably alien in their morals and worldview.
Wonderful, all of them, fascinating and compelling. But not favorite.
What makes a good alien in a story? It’s that delicious double vision of strangeness and plausibility, the feeling that if you strain or squint, you can not only believe in them, but embrace their existence for a moment—like trying to understand a shape in four dimensions, like trying to understand what it’s like to be a bat. A good alien lives in a thoroughly imagined world, and helps us see our own world fresh. They help us understand ourselves more richly, but they’re also rich in their own right.
The reason I couldn’t come up with a good answer to ‘What’s your favorite alien,’ I realized, was that my favorite imagining of an alien isn’t from a work of sci-fi, and doesn’t take place on a spaceship or another planet. My favorite aliens once lived on earth.
One day when I was 12 years old, my mother brought me home a book from the library.
I was a ravenous, unpicky reader, freshly graduated to adult novels, and would take any offering. It was a hefty mass-market paperback, its gray and brown cover evoking a geological formation, its thin pages fanned at the corner from heavy use. ‘I remember loving this,’ she said, as she handed me Jean M. Auel’s 1980 bestseller The Clan of the Cave Bear.
Pause here: Everyone thinks this was a curious book to hand a 12-year-old because they think the book is full of graphic love scenes, a romance novel wrapped in Paleolithic furs. It’s not. The rest of the series is full of sex (yes, I did grow up to, before I wrote this book about aliens, review romance novels for a spell), but Clan‘s only graphic scene is a rape. Still maybe not what I would hand my tween child. Probably worse than a steamy romance in that respect, actually! But my mom had forgotten that was in there. And the rest of the book mattered so much more.
It wasn’t the first or last book I would fall in love with, in that magical span of late childhood and young adulthood when reading is all-consuming, when you lose yourself in books and come up for air with your bones rearranged. A few years earlier, I’d read Madeleine L’Engle’s Time quintet over and over and over. A few years later I’d read all of Frank Herbert’s Dune. But the Clan series was not only the middle point on that timeline, it was also the heart of the Venn diagram of everything I loved and would come to love in reading and my own writing: science, fantasy, romance, a girl who doesn’t fit in trying to understand herself and her world. And aliens.
Yes, aliens. The ones who lived on earth: Neanderthals.
The Clan of the Cave Bear tells the story of a Homo sapiens girl, Ayla, who is orphaned at age 5 in an earthquake. She’s found by a band of Neanderthals. She’s one of the people the Clan thinks of as ‘the Others,’ but the Neanderthal medicine woman, Iza, is unable to leave the hurt and helpless girl behind. Iza heals her and the girl is adopted into the Clan. As Ayla grows up, she learns their alien ways: the Clan speak with guttural sounds and grunts and a rich language of hand gestures; they have customs and legends and a vivid sense of the spirit world. In short, they’re people.
Looking back on why I fell in love with this book, I see that I’ve always loved it as an alien story. When I reread it for this essay, I thought: Damn, this holds up. Set on the Pleistocene steppes of Eastern Europe, the world is built as vividly as any set on another planet. Auel lovingly and beautifully lists species of plants and animals, evoking an abundance of nature that both emphasizes what we’ve lost—caused the world to lose—in the millennia since Homo sapiens’ ascendence and illustrates the rich resources on which Ice Age people depended. It is a landscape not just to be lived in, but lived from: ‘Catkins still clung to fully leafed birches. Delicate petals of pink and white drifted down, blown blossoms of fruit and nut trees, giving early promise of autumn’s bounty.’
It’s not just the worldbuilding, though. Auel’s Neanderthals suit the needs of the story as any fictional alien does. Some aliens are imagined as opaque, unknowable others: the heptapods; Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. They evoke for us the strangeness of the cosmos, leaving ownership of the story to human characters. Other, knowable aliens evoke the strangeness of other people, daring our empathy to extend farther than it has before. At odds with the prevailing caveman stereotypes of her time, and inspired by her big-hearted reading of archaeology, Auel writes Neanderthals as sensitive, intelligent people with a rich culture. At the same time, the extrapolations she makes from physiology contrast with the sense of Homo sapiens as a species at the start of their journey. It is a radical imagining of conservative beings.
Auel weaves into her story imagined origins for some of the most meaningful Neanderthal archaeological finds: One, a man who survived crushing head trauma, a broken foot, and amputation of one arm below the elbow to still live into his 40s, whom Auel imagines as the Clan’s highest holy man and Ayla’s adoptive father. (The idea that Neanderthals cared well enough for each other that one could survive decades past these injuries was an early seed of her story.) Another is a skeleton surrounded by clumps of pollen. Some archaeologists, and Auel, interpret this as evidence the body was buried with flowers; Auel goes farther, taking the skeleton’s somewhat fetal position as proof of a conception of the spirit world, the body positioned in death as it had come into this world, to be born anew.
Her vision of Neanderthals’ alienness comes from archaeology, too. Building on what was known from Neanderthal skulls, Auel writes in the novel, ‘All those primitive people, with almost no frontal lobes … but with huge brains—larger than any race of man then living or future generations yet unborn … were the culmination of a branch of mankind whose brain was developed in the back of their heads, in the occipital and the parietal regions that control vision and bodily sensation and store memory.’ She doesn’t diminish their capacity because of their lack of frontal lobes, but instead imagines what an intelligence situated at the back of the brain could mean. ‘Instinct had evolved, in Clan people,’ she writes, ‘into memory.’ It’s a fantastical kind of memory with which individuals can recall the knowledge of their forbearers.
But reliance on memory is also a reliance on the past. ‘The Clan lived by unchanging tradition,’ Auel writes, a culture unsuited to survival. The world changes. The Clan cannot. ‘They had passed beyond the point of developing in a different way. That would be left for a newer form, a different experiment of nature.’
That different experiment is the Others, Ayla’s people, and dropped into their midst she shows the Clan how another kind of human could be, just as the Clan show the same to the reader. ‘She was one of the Others; a newer, younger breed, more vital, more dynamic, not controlled by hidebound traditions from a brain that was nearly all memory,’ Auel writes. ‘She could accept the new, shape it to her will, forge it into ideas undreamed of by the Clan.’
Writers love to have aliens tell humans how they see them: In Carl Sagan’s Contact, the alien says, ‘Love is very important [to humans]. You’re an interesting mix.’ In Octavia Butler’s Dawn, it’s that humanity is ‘intelligent [and] hierarchical … It’s a terrestrial characteristic.’ Aliens are more than a mirror, more than a foil; they’re sentient and can tell us what they see.
Auel’s Neanderthals see Ayla’s strange newness, too. Her antagonist unpacks his loathing of her: ‘The real problem was she was not Clan. She had not had subservience bred into her for untold generations.’ (The Clan are not only small-c conservative, but echo the big-C kind, too, falling into rigid gender roles which Auel’s Homo sapiens eschew. Alien stories give us what their authors think we need, which in Auel’s case was, at least in part, feminism.) Ayla’s adopted father, the Clan’s holy man, sees the same difference, but with sorrow and love: ‘He could make no quantum leaps, no intuitive strokes of genius. His mind, he knew, was more powerful than hers by far; more intelligent perhaps. But his genius was of a different nature. … In her, he sensed the youth, the vitality of a newer form.’
Auel’s Neanderthals, as an alien kind of people, reveal what defines our kind. It’s not language, culture, spirituality, or love. Instead, it’s creativity. Adaptability and the capacity for intuitive leaps.
Just as Auel works real-world archaeology into the novel, through the rest of the series she seeds the origins of many meaningful paleolithic archaeological finds (Venuses abound) as well as the invention of new technologies: the sewing needle, striking pyrite to make fire, soap, fired pottery, the domestication of horses and wolves. Ayla is a force of newness, as are all of her people. And as the Clan faces the end of their time, the Others step into their beginning, one in which they—we—don’t just depend on the world, but shape it.
We now know that the average Homo sapiens can trace about 1 to 4 percent of their DNA to Neanderthals. You don’t get that from a handful of fluke encounters. For thousands of years, two species of people walked the earth, and they seem to have known each other as such. Thanks to Auel, it’s not just their genes that survive, but one imagined version of their very alien, very human story.
Reference: https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/aliens-neanderthals-clan-cave-bear.html
Ref: slate
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