Publication Order of Earth’s Children Books
| The Clan of the Cave Bear | 1980 |
| The Valley of Horses | 1982 |
| The Mammoth Hunters | 1985 |
| The Plains of Passage | 1990 |
| The Shelters of Stone | 2002 |
| The Land of Painted Caves | 2011 |
About Jean M. Auel
Jean M. Auel (born 1936) is an American novelist, the author of the six “Earth’s Children” novels set in Ice Age Europe. The series began with “The Clan of the Cave Bear” in 1980 and ended with “The Land of Painted Caves” in 2011, and has sold more than 45 million copies worldwide.
She was born Jean Marie Untinen in Chicago on 18 February 1936, into a family of Finnish descent. She married Ray Bernard Auel in 1954 and the couple settled in Portland, Oregon, where they raised five children. Auel worked at Tektronix as a clerk, a circuit-board designer, a technical writer and a credit manager, and earned an MBA from the University of Portland in 1976.
In 1977 she left her job and began researching the Ice Age for what started as a short story. Besides long hours of library work, she took a survival class to learn how to build an ice cave, and studied fire making, leather tanning and stone knapping with the aboriginal skills expert Jim Riggs. The result, “The Clan of the Cave Bear”, was published by Crown in 1980. It follows Ayla, a Cro-Magnon girl orphaned by an earthquake at the age of five and adopted by a group of Neanderthals known as the Clan.
The later books take Ayla away from the Clan in search of her own kind. She meets Jondalar, and the pair travel across Europe along the Danube valley towards his home in what is now France. By 1990 the first three novels had sold more than 20 million copies, and Crown paid about 25 million dollars for “The Plains of Passage” and the two books that would follow it. The success of the series allowed Auel to visit prehistoric sites across Europe and to meet specialists such as Jean Clottes, who led the scientific study of the Chauvet Cave in France.
“The Clan of the Cave Bear” was filmed in 1986, directed by Michael Chapman with Daryl Hannah as Ayla. In 2008 the French Minister of Culture named Auel an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Publicity for “The Land of Painted Caves” confirmed that it would be the final book in the sequence, and she has not published a novel since.