The Plains of Passage - Jean M. Auel [460]
She stopped. “I’ve seen that place before, Jondalar!”
“How could you? You’ve never been here before.”
Suddenly it all came together. It was the cave in my dreams! The one that came from Creb’s memories, she thought. Now I know what he was trying to tell me in my dreams.
“I told you my totem meant you for me and sent you to come and get me. He wanted you to take me home, the place where my Cave Lion spirit will be happy. This is it. I have come home, too, Jondalar. Your home is my home,” Ayla said.
He smiled; but before he could answer, they heard a voice shouting his name. “Jondalar! Jondalar!”
They looked up along a path to a cliff overhang, and saw a young woman.
“Mother! Come quick,” she said. “Jondalar is back. Jondalar is home!”
And so am I, Ayla thought.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Each of the books in this Earth’s Children™ series has posed its own unique challenges, but from the beginning, when the sometime novel/six-book outline was first conceived, the fourth book, the “travel book,” has been both the most difficult and the most interesting to research and write. The Plains of Passage required some additional travel for the author as well, including a return visit to Czechoslovakia, and trips to Hungary, Austria, and Germany to follow a portion of the Danube (the Great Mother River). But to put the setting into the Ice Age, even more time was needed for library research.
I am again indebted to Dr. Jan Jelinek, Director Emeritus, Anthropos Institute, Brno, Czechoslovakia, for his unfailing kindness, assistance, and astute observations and interpretations of the rich Upper Paleolithic artifacts of the region.
I am also grateful to Dr. Bohuslav Klima, Archeologicky Ustav CSAV, for the wonderful wine tasting in his own cellar from his vineyards near Dolni Vestonice, but more for giving so generously of his lifetime of knowledge and information about that most important early site.
I would also like to thank Dr. Jiri Svoboda, Archeologicky Ustav CSAV, for information on his startling new discoveries that add greatly to our knowledge about our Early Modern Human ancestors who lived more than two hundred fifty centuries ago when ice covered a quarter of the globe.
To Dr. Olga Soffer, the leading American expert on the Upper Paleolithic people of Central and Eastern Europe, I extend thanks and gratitude beyond measure for keeping me informed about the most recent developments, and supplied with the latest papers, including the results of a new study on the earliest ceramic art in human history.
I want to thank Dr. Milford Wolpoff, University of Michigan, for his insights during our discussion about population distributions on the northern continents during the last Ice Age, when our modern human forebears clustered in concentrations in certain favorable areas and left most of the land, though rich in animal life, without people.
Finding the pieces of the puzzle that were necessary to create this fictional world of the prehistoric past was a challenge; putting them together was another. After studying the material available about glaciers and the environment that surrounded them, I still could not get a completely clear picture of all the northern lands, so that I could move my characters through their world. There were questions, theories at odds with each other—some of which did not seem very well thought out—pieces that did not fit.
Finally, with great relief and growing enthusiasm, I found the one clearly explained and thoughtfully constructed study that brought the Ice Age world into sharp focus. It answered the questions that had risen in my mind, and enabled me to fit in the rest of the pieces from other sources and my own speculations so that I could make a logical setting. I will be eternally grateful to R. Dale Guthrie for his article “Mammals of the Mammoth Steppe as Paleoenvironmental Indicators,” pages 307–326, from Paleoecology of Beringia (Ed. by David