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Auel gets passing grades from archaeologists on how she interprets the facts. "We can tell you how the paintings were made, but not why," says American archaeologist Roy Larick. "Jean does as good a job at speculating as anyone else." Where knowledge falls short, ideology takes over. An ardent feminist, Auel makes a case for a matriarchal Cro-Magnon society, basing her theory on Upper Paleolithic female fertility figures known as Venuses. These statuettes with exaggerated breasts and buttocks have been found by the ( hundreds, whereas no male sexual symbols have been uncovered. "I'm trying to psych out an entire culture when all we have are bits and pieces to go on," she says. But of one thing she's sure: "It's wrong to think of our ancestors bopping women over the head and dragging them by the hair. Anthropologists have found that most hunter-gatherer societies are very equal."
Nonetheless, Ayla is a stereotyped wonderwoman: she stops a cave lion's attack with the wave of her hand, learns languages in minutes and uses birth control before anyone else even knows how babies are conceived. In The Clan of the Cave Bear, fact and fiction were plausibly balanced. But Plains verges on the ludicrous as Ayla expounds on clitoral vs. vaginal orgasm and rescues Jondalar from man-hating Amazons. And much of Plains reads like a textbook: page after page listing animals and plants. The archaeology may be accurate, but stilted dialogue and "his-loins-ached-with-need" sex scenes are alternately hilarious and pathetic.
By and large, Auel has succeeded in popularizing a misperceived period. Nonetheless, even she may sense that her prehistoric cash cow may be overmilked. "Ayla's good company, but after a while you want to write about something else," she says. Then Auel is likely to make an important discovery of her own: whether her fans will remain loyal once the glaciers recede.