The Clan of the Cave Bear

Iza is the Clan’s medicine woman and the sister of Brun and Creb. At the start of the novel, she’s pregnant and has lost her mate in the earthquake that destroyed the group’s cave. On the trek to find a new home, she stumbles across a badly injured Ayla and insists on rescuing and nursing her back to health. In time, Iza adopts Ayla and raises her alongside her own daughter, Uba. Her authority comes not only from her skill as a healer but from being part of a revered lineage of medicine women, which gives her unusual influence within the group.

As a healer and teacher, Iza operates in the novel as one of Ayla’s mentors. Recognizing that Ayla’s Other appearance may make it hard for her to secure a mate in Clan society, Iza trains her in the medicinal arts so she will have status and a role independent of marriage. This apprenticeship shapes Ayla’s identity: She learns herb craft, midwifery, and the ethics of care, and she inherits Iza’s position to become a bearer of knowledge the Clan depends on.

Narratively, Iza embodies the possibility of kinship across boundaries: She’s the person who makes Ayla “of the Clan” while also preparing her to outgrow it. From the first moment of arguing with Brun to let the girl live to countless quiet interventions afterward, she translates rules, softens punishments, and models empathy in a community that often reads Ayla’s differences as threats. Through Iza, the book shows how authority can be exercised as nurture rather than domination. Healing is power, and caregiving is a way to keep a fragile society intact.

Her death is a turning point, but even in dying, she sets Ayla’s path by advising her foster daughter to seek the Others, which becomes the animating quest of the next book and the larger Earth’s Children series. In this way, Iza functions first as Ayla’s true mother, saving her, training her, and helping her grow, and finally directing her toward a wider world.

Creb is the Clan’s Mog-ur, or shaman, and spiritual authority, and the elder brother of Brun and Iza. Auel drew inspiration for him from the real remains of the Neanderthal known as Shanidar 1 from the Shanidar Cave site. Creb was disabled from birth and physically scarred after a cave-bear attack. As a result, he cannot hunt like the other men of the Clan. However, his standing in the group is just behind Brun since he mediates between the people and the spirits. As such, he operates in a strange middle ground due to his high status and physical differences that set him apart from the others. This links him to Ayla, who also does not fit the standard of what someone from the Clan “should” look like, and who crucially doesn’t treat him differently from anyone else.

When Iza brings Ayla into the group, Creb helps adopt her into his hearth and, crucially, recognizes and names the powerful cave-lion totem he believes protects her. In practice, this makes him both a guardian of tradition and someone who frames Ayla’s difference as meaningful rather than merely threatening. Creb’s bond with Ayla is also deeply personal: He becomes a teacher for her and a surrogate father figure who offers status, protection, and, on occasion, political cover. However, his affection for the girl also causes him significant turmoil. He’s expected to uphold Clan traditions and rules, and Ayla is by her nature a rulebreaker. While he often upholds Brun’s ruling, he’s also the one to intervene when Brun is about to condemn Durc to die.

During the Mog-urs’ ceremony at the Clan Gathering, he links minds with Ayla after she consumes the potion. During this, he comes to realize that Ayla and her people are the future, and his own people are doomed, leaving him in a state of existential sadness. At the end of the novel, he passes on his title to his apprentice, Goov, before being killed in the earthquake that destroys the cave.

Broud is the Clan’s heir apparent and the son of the leader, Brun, whose insecurity and hunger for status make him Ayla’s primary antagonist. From the moment Ayla is adopted into the group, Broud resents the attention she draws and the ways her curiosity and luck seem to upstage him. As he matures, that resentment hardens into cruelty: He uses his authority to harass and punish her, and eventually rapes her, which results in the birth of her son, Durc.

Within the novel, Broud functions as the wound that exposes the limits of Clan tradition. He’s a competent hunter and the designated successor of the group, but unlike Brun, who balances custom with pragmatism, Broud confuses dominance with leadership. His clashes with Ayla drive many of the novel’s key events, from public humiliations to her temporary “death-curse” and, finally, to the permanent curse he orders nearly the moment he becomes leader. Thematically, Broud embodies the social code Auel wants to scrutinize. He’s vain, impulsive, and a foil to Ayla’s ingenuity and compassion. His behavior also shows how a thin-skinned young man can weaponize a rigid patriarchal system to reassert personal control.

On one hand, Broud serves as a source of constant trauma for Ayla, concluding by sundering the only family she has ever known. On the other hand, he inadvertently proves Ayla’s strength over and over again. His pressure on her only shows her resilience, empathy, and adaptability. By exiling her, he also ensures that the lessons she learned while living among the Clan won’t be trapped there, but will instead be carried into the wider world, where they can change it. In that way, Broud isn’t only the villain of Ayla’s early life, but also the catalyst for the character she becomes later in the series.

Brun is the leader of the Neanderthal group that finds and adopts Ayla. He’s also the brother of Iza and Creb, and the father of Broud, which places him at the center of the familial and political drama that the plot centers around. Auel uses Brun to explore how authority works in a small, tradition-bound community. He must keep people fed, safe, and unified after the earthquake that drives them to seek a new cave, and through all the issues that follow.

As a character, Brun is defined by caution and respect for custom, but also by pragmatism. He constantly weighs ritual against necessity, and justice against mercy. His leadership is most tested in the triangle among himself, Ayla, and his heir, Broud. Broud resents Ayla’s presence and repeatedly tries to assert dominance, forcing Brun to arbitrate between a gifted but transgressive girl and his own volatile successor. It shows Brun’s role as stabilizer: He can temper punishments and set boundaries, but he cannot remake the social code or his son’s character.

In the end, Brun steps aside as leader and allows Broud to succeed him, triggering a series of horrific events that result in Creb’s literal death and the placement of a permanent death-curse on Ayla that pushes her into exile. While he did allow Broud to become leader in his place, Brun does push back against him in the end. He admonishes his son for the younger man’s actions and openly regrets the choice of making him leader, saying, “She was more man than you are. Ayla should have been the son of my mate” (495). When Ayla is forced to leave Durc behind, Brun promises to protect and raise him.