Lives in Ruins

by Marilyn Johnson

  All the students who signed up for the class but didn’t bother to attend the lectures showed up for the exam. The teaching assistant had to go hunt for extra desks. Shea prefaced the test with a short lecture that distracted me briefly. He talked about Shanidar Cave in Iraq, excavated in the fifties and sixties by the married archaeologists Ralph and Rose Solecki, who found Neandertals buried there with evidence of flowers. The startling find, which has never been replicated, quickly worked its way into the popular culture and became the primary inspiration for Jean Auel’s fur-bodice-ripping bestsellers that began with The Clan of the Cave Bear. But Shea wondered, had those Neandertals been deliberately buried with flowers, or had the flowers been introduced by a native burrowing rodent? I am a skeptic; I voted for the rodent.

  Then Shea passed out the exam: mostly multiple choice, about global temperature shifts and the timing of geological epochs and stone weapons and grave goods, and a short essay based on The Humans Who Went Extinct, the book by Clive Finlayson: Why, according to its author, had Neandertals died out? And what was the most important factor in the evolutionary success of Homo sapiens? I fussed over my answers, circled back, erased, watched as drops of sweat dripped onto my words: Neandertal lived in small groups and had a narrow niche and few strategies when the climate warmed up and their prey changed. Homo sapiens people communicated and traded widely, and were flexible and adaptive. If their cereal crop failed and there were no more reindeer, they’d pack up and head to cousin Joe’s.

  After the class, with dangerous levels of adrenaline coursing through my veins, I had a delayed realization on the drive home and banged the steering wheel in frustration. Damn it! Chance! I forgot chance! Chance and luck—huge factors in evolutionary survival.

  In New York City the next day, heading down the subway stairs, I began to feel a tightness in my chest. I slowed down and let the others of my species flow around me, variable and complex. If I collapsed in a subway car, they would find my notebook, full of the advice and maxims of Shea, who once called himself “Beardo the Weirdo”: “never camp by the edge of a waterhole”; “don’t screw with hippos”; “baboons are like German shepherds on crack”; and “any of you had seal? very good”—and what would the forensics team make of these? Such a shame to die before the goat roast. Maybe skeletal remains and the explicit consideration of extinction were getting to me. When the tightness persisted and began to feel painful, I took myself to the emergency room. Pinned to an IV line, an EKG machine rolling up to capture my flutters and skips, I considered the nurse’s routine question: Had I been under stress?

  I looked into her kind, concerned eyes. I had just taken a science test for the first time in decades, I told her. Could that send me into cardiac arrest?

  I was not in cardiac arrest, but, just to be safe, I spent the weekend in the hospital, where I read the assignments in The Human Career, our thousand-plus-page textbook, and submitted to more tests, including one where, surrounded by emergency personnel, I walked faster and faster on a treadmill. My heart did not fail.

  Shea e-mailed the results of my archaeology test, which I also did not fail. “32/33,” he wrote. “Not bad.” Not bad? Are you kidding? All but one answer right? I felt the weight lift from my chest. Not mentioning chance as a factor in extinction hadn’t hurt me, but I did miss a question about the Natufians, a Homo sapiens culture* from 10,000 years ago. The lovely Natufians flourished for several thousand years in what is now the Middle East. They domesticated dogs and used mortars and pestles and spent hours making polished bone beads. I pictured them: good cooks, laid-back folk, artsy-craftsy. If I had to go back in time, I’d be a Natufian, me and my dog, Homer. We’d eat gazelle. Even now I can hear Shea’s voice: “Gazelle—the Big Mac of the Natufians.”

  “THE NAKED CHILD ran out of the hide-covered lean-to toward the rocky beach at the bend in the small river.” My heart beat faster hearing the first sentence of The Clan of the Cave Bear, the audiobook that kept me company on the long drives to and from Stony Brook. Jean Auel’s novel, set about 25,000 years ago, tells the story of a lost Homo sapiens girl adopted and raised by Neandertals. A monster bestseller in 1980, it was followed by five sequels, the last just published in 2011. The series, called Earth’s Children,* combines adventure and romance with a manual on survival in the Ice Age. Auel’s biggest achievement was to replace the image of a brutish caveman with a beautiful, intelligent, resourceful cave woman. In Ayla, Auel created the most famous figure of the Upper Paleolithic, after, that is, the Venus of Willendorf. Auel was enabled in this by archaeologists, who furnished the groundwork for the ingenious, detailed, and complex societies that she worked out in her books.

  Originally, Auel said she imagined “a story about a young woman who was living with people who were significantly different, but they let her stay because she was taking care of an old man with a crippled arm.” She wanted to set the story in the distant past, but knew nothing about it. “What kind of character is a caveman?” she wondered. In her research, she came across the books of Ralph Solecki, who, with his wife, had unearthed the Neandertal man killed in a rockslide at Shanidar and supposedly buried with flowers. “In life he was blind in one eye and lame and one of his arms had been amputated at the elbow. Here’s my old man with a crippled arm! He really existed!” Auel devised a set of questions—“How did a Neandertal caveman, who was half blind, one-armed, and lame, survive to be an old man? What did he have to offer [to the other Neandertals]? Who amputated his arm, who stopped the bleeding, controlled the shock?”—then worked out the answers in the course of her first novel. Her Neandertal, she concluded, was a respected shaman, looked after by his sister, a skilled medicine woman. They stumbled upon the orphaned Ayla, obviously one of “the others,” but took pity and adopted her into the clan. When the shaman’s sister died, Ayla laid a wreath of medicinal flowers on her body in tribute. In her acknowledgments, Auel wrote how moved she had been by Ralph Solecki’s work and apologized “for one instance of literary license I took with his facts for the sake of my fiction. In real life, it was a Neanderthal who put flowers in the grave.” *

  Clearly, Auel had read archaeologists besides Solecki, some of whom argued that the great caves where prehistoric art has been found were seasonal gathering places for far-flung tribes, and others who have described Neandertals’ bone damage from close-range hunting that looked much like the bone damage of rodeo cowboys. She studied cognitive-science papers to devise a language for the Neandertals, assuming that their vocalizations would sound more guttural than those of Homo sapiens, and she gave them gruntlike names, like Uba, Goov, Creb, Broud. Artifacts found in European and Middle Eastern sites appear in her books, like the ubiquitous Venus figures, which she took as indicators of an earth-mother-centered religion shared by even far-flung bands of Homo sapiens. She sought out archaeologists with a particular expertise in artifacts like baskets and textiles that disintegrate relatively quickly, leaving little trace of ancient women’s work. Auel knew that these two different peoples, Neandertal and Homo sapiens, overlapped for perhaps 10,000 years in Europe (50,000 years or longer in the Middle East), and might have had contact, though there is no archaeological evidence of it. So she devised a storyline that kept them at a hostile distance yet gave them plenty of dramatic opportunities to interact.

  In Auel’s hands, Ayla becomes a kind of ambassador between the slow, tough, paternalistic Neandertals, and the flexible, innovative, woman-centered Homo sapiens. After the death of her protectors, Ayla is cast out by the clan and lives alone in a remote valley until the traveler named Jondalar reintroduces her to the world of Homo sapiens. Jondalar’s people, who despise and fear Neandertals as “flatheads” and “animals,” have difficulty believing Ayla’s stories that their grunts and gestures constitute language and that their society is as complex and elaborate as their own. Ayla alone understands that both genera are people, children of the Earth. She is the first populist.

  Auel telescopes thousands of years of hu
man evolution through her heroine. (Ayla, Auel—coincidence?) Ayla masters arithmetic and multiple languages and invents animal domestication, horseback riding, spear-throwing, sewing with bone needles, and starting fires with flint. (Auel gives another character credit for inventing pottery and soap.) Ayla is also a formidable hunter and an awesome cook. She is a healer and can set bones, administer herbal anesthesia, concoct hallucinogenic cocktails, prevent pregnancy, and cure hangovers. She even discovers Lascaux cave, and finds the artist to paint it. And there’s more! She whistles birds down from the air and tames not just horses and a wolf, but 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 is tall, 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 in the sophisticated ancestor. And look at all those lay people she had gathered under the tent to marvel at archaeology’s promise! On the other hand . . .

  Given a platform to address the Society for American Archaeology’s annual conference in 1990, Jean Auel assured the assembled professionals that “no one has more respect and admiration for scientists and researchers than I do. . . . In fact, I’m sort of an ‘archaeology groupie.’” But she went on to say that it was essentially the archaeologists’ fault that people knew little, if anything, about their fascinating research. “I sometimes think scientists are required to take a class entitled ‘Obfuscating English,’” she complained. Maybe they should stop sounding so scientific and quit using jargon like Clovis, microblade, Pleistocene, and Paleolithic.* “Write at least some of your reports in clear, understandable language,” she went on. “Romance the public. Let them know that what you are doing is not only important, but fun, exciting, fascinating. Get them involved. Show them how sharp a stone tool is—nothing turned my thinking around so dramatically as the first time I made a blade out of obsidian and cut a piece of leather with it.

  “Romance the public,” she repeated. “They’ll love you for it.”

  Wait—weren’t these the people who had done all the excavating, the hard science, and the sophisticated thinking that formed the foundation of her work? Weren’t these the people who put that work in her hands and interrupted their own work to answer her questions? Add this to the list of challenges archaeologists have to face: that the careful practice of their not-very-profitable profession might be interpreted by its most conspicuous beneficiary as a failure, not a choice.

  JOHN SHEA’S REPUTATION as a wild man of archaeology has been fed by stories like the one that opened the profile of him in Science. “One day in the late 1980s, an alarmed secretary at Harvard University called campus police. An apparently crazed young man had cornered a deer in the courtyard of the university’s Peabody Museum and was hurling spears at it,” the piece began. The deer was dead, of course; the scene was a lithics experiment in progress; the young man was neither crazed nor crazy.

  I saw John Shea in verbal combat more than once. One of his tools is sarcasm; in class, he questioned the intelligence of the average archaeologist and university administrator and frequently “dropped the F-bomb”—and when the grad students looked shocked, he laughed them off. At the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society, a brutal two-day dawn-to-dusk series of technical presentations like “Howieson’s Poort: New Data from Sibudu Cave,” Shea relished the heated debates in the short question-and-answer sessions and didn’t hesitate to puncture presumptions. Woe to the colleague who labeled an ax unfinished (like a would-be scientist who labeled a glass half full): How did he know it was “unfinished”? One dapper archaeologist suggested that the tools found at a site in South Africa were so unusual they deserved a new name, and this drew Shea’s objection. “Does the world really need this?” he said bluntly.

  The way tools are classified and named in archaeology is bewildering. In a paper for Evolutionary Anthropology subtitled “Some Advice from Uncle Screwtape,” Shea took on the conventions of stone-tool classifications. Like C. S. Lewis in the original Screwtape Letters, Shea adopted the persona of a demon advising a young person, in this case, about how to make the study of the most durable artifacts irrelevant to human evolution. “Dear Nephew,” wrote Shea, in character, “I am delighted to learn that you have decided to take up the study of stone tools. A wise choice. The talking monkeys have been dragging these shiny objects back to their caves for millions of years. You will never be at a loss for things to write.” Then he advised: “If you and your colleagues disagree about how to classify particular artifacts, create rival typologies. . . . When you write about stone-tool function, don’t waste time doing experiments. . . . Use your intuition and embed your hypotheses about stone tool function in the tool names themselves (for example, scraper, handaxe, chopper).”


  How reasonable: conducting experiments with stone tools was a great way to figure out what they were designed to do, and of course one shouldn’t label a tool a “scraper” if you didn’t know what it did. As for the classifications, Shea told me, “Everyone says it’s chaos, even the people who have worked at it a long time.” Why did archaeologists want to give a type of stone tool a new name? Because then, whenever that name was mentioned, the person who thought up the name had to be cited.

  After the meeting, Shea shrugged off his verbal sparring as no big deal, though he admitted he did enjoy the bloody intellectual battles at the small paleoanthropology meetings. People were too polite for his taste at the larger archaeology conferences. After watching him in action, I expected him to be sharp-tongued off duty, as well. I visited his wooded backyard one evening and sat in a webbed lawn chair while he and his wife told archaeology stories from the Middle East, where they had both dug. Shea was mild and relaxed under the trees. I told him that I had read Ralph Solecki’s Shanidar: The First Flower People, Solecki’s book for general readers about Neandertals burying their dead with flowers. I imagined we would snicker together: What kind of scientist subtitles his book The First Flower People?* But it was a mellower Shea who responded that I should give the old archaeologist a break. “Don’t forget, the book is fifty years old,” he said. In multiple ways, I saw the blunt teacher and provocateur of paleoanthropology be kind and solicitous.*

  In his backyard, he held out a peanut to a chipmunk edging closer while his wife watched him fondly. “The birds love him, too,” Pat Crawford said.

  They met when Shea was a college senior, sitting in on a graduate seminar at MIT. She was older than he and “all she knew of rock ’n roll was the Beatles!” he said in a can-you-believe-it voice. He had taught her about Pink Floyd and Black Flag. She took him to the opera and the theater. “A Doll’s House—I wanted to scream, ‘Get me out of here!’” Shea recalled, “but we were both happy with Shakespeare.” On their first date, they went to the library. They go to their local public library two or three times a week and read, not surprisingly, voraciously; they were each in the middle of literary novels. Crawford, an adjunct in the archaeology department at Stony Brook, works in a laboratory now. She told me she “pinched pennies like mad,” which was how they could afford the place in Santa Fe. I took in their modest home in Long Island, its original kitchen and bath, the pet rabbit’s cage in the dining room—none of it any more decorated than they were. Their lives were completely purposeful.