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    The Mammoth Hunters
    The Mammoth Hunters
    The Mammoth Hunters
    Audiobook31 hours

    The Mammoth Hunters

    Written by Jean M. Auel

    Narrated by Sandra Burr

    4/5

    ()

    • Survival

    • Community

    • Personal Growth

    • Cultural Differences

    • Love & Relationships

    • Fish Out of Water

    • Forbidden Love

    • Chosen One

    • Love Triangle

    • Found Family

    • Star-Crossed Lovers

    • Power of Love

    • Noble Savage

    • Rite of Passage

    • Power of Friendship

    • Nature

    • Prehistoric Life

    • Friendship

    • Relationships

    • Personal Growth & Self-Discovery

    About this audiobook

    Once again Jean M. Auel opens the door of a time long past to reveal an age of wonder and danger at the dawn of the modern human race.

    Riding Whinney with Jondalar, the man she loves, and followed by the mare’s colt, Ayla ventures into the land of the Mamutoi—the Mammoth Hunters. She has finally found the Others she has been seeking. Though Ayla must learn their different customs and language, she is adopted because of her remarkable hunting ability, singular healing skills, and uncanny fire-making technique. She finds women friends and painful memories of the Clan she left behind, and meets Ranec, the dark-skinned, magnetic master carver of ivory, whom she cannot refuse—inciting Jondalar to a fierce jealousy that he tries to control by avoiding her.

    Throughout the icy winter the tension mounts, but warming weather will bring the great mammoth hunt and the mating rituals of the Summer Meeting, when Ayla must choose to remain with Ranec and the Mamutoi, or to follow Jondalar on a long journey into an unknown future.

    Third in the acclaimed Earth’s Children® series

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateMay 16, 2017
    ISBN9781543613162
    The Mammoth Hunters
    Author

    Jean M. Auel

    In 1980, Jean M. Auel became a literary legend with The Clan of the Cave Bear, the first book in her Earth’s Children® series. Now a mother, grandmother, and author who has sold more than 45 million copies worldwide, Auel is a heroine of history and prehistory alike, changing the world one enthralling page at a time.

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    Reviews for The Mammoth Hunters

    4/5

    1,994 ratings46 reviews

    What our readers think

    Readers find this title to be a mix of enjoyment and confusion. Some readers appreciate the author's imagination and the connection they feel to the story. Others enjoy the historical and prehistoric elements. However, there are negative reviews that mention explicit sexual content, which some readers find excessive and unnecessary. Despite this, the series has a dedicated fan base who admire the strong and resilient protagonist. Overall, the book offers a story of love, laughter, tears, and lessons about acceptance.

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Third book in the earth children’s series. Ayla and Jondalar leave Ayla’s valley to find others of their kind. They meet the Mammoth Hunters on a hunting trip and are asked to return and visit at their home camp. Many adventures occur with Ayla and Jondalar and other members of the Mammoth Camp.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      My favorite of the series
    • 5/5
      The Earth Children series is my favourite book series ever. I have read and reread these books over the last 30 years, starting out not much older than Ayla. She is my hero. She's strong, she's clever, she has bad things happen to her but she refuses to let them win, she can look after herself. But she is also incredible naive. She's gentle, and giving, loving and outstanding. A healer, a innovator, a generally nice person. And she loves Jondalar.
    • 3/5
      So I can't finish, this is where I stop the series. These books started out really interesting, I liked the narratives and the clash of tradition and survival. But then they just got so horny out of nowhere. So many uses of the word "throbbing". I'm not saying they're bad, I'm sure you could enjoy it, but I just can't take it anymore. I swear the plot is only about cave sex now.
    • 2/5
      Good book. But NOT a children's book. This series has graphic sex. Especially book 3 it goes into some very very graphic details and is NOT FOR CHILDREN......
    • 2/5
      That moment when the protagonist are going to be forever together. This book! Also for the reader who is missing out on cave porn. It was written in the 1980 when cave porn was more or less acceptable.
    • 5/5
      Out of the valley Ayla and Jondalar meet this new Cro-Magnon group called the Mamutoi…the mammoth hunters. They join them and live with them for a while. I will tell you that in this book I wasn’t the biggest fan of Jondalar…you see, he has a serious jealousy issues. When they arrive to the cavern where the Mamutoi live, they met Ranec, a black Cro-Magnon that turns out to be really attractive to Ayla. Off course Jondalar doesn’t like this and because of his jealousy Ayla and him, fall into a ridiculous fight. Obviously the book doesn’t talk exclusively about this, is with this group that Ayla starts feeling part of the Cro-Magnon people again. She learns about The Mother which is the deity they have in the group, as well as she gets in touch with her affinity with the Mother. A new animal joins the group in this group, Wolf, which will make you remember the most playful dog you have ever met. At the end, Jondalar and Ayla are back together, but not before falling apart greatly, founding each other again and remembering how much they love each other.
    • 5/5
      The mammoth Hunters is a story of love, laughter tears and lessons about acceptance of those who are different!
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed this book, but found it no pause between paragraphs a bit confusing, momentarily.
    • 3/5
      I really did enjoy this book. I just got a little tired of the gratuitous sex scenes. Instead of reading through them, as I did in Valley of the Horses, I just skipped/skimmed over them. They added nothing to the story.
    • 5/5
      the book might be from your imagination, but oh what an imagination you have. I have loved your books since they came out to buy. my imagination is really on the same line as yours,, I feel the story and I am more comfortable reading your books cause I imagine that I lived back then to at some point...
    • 2/5
      Well, this book starts off much stronger than the others because the main character is surrounded by people from the beginning. I'm enjoying it so far, but I have to say that Madam Auel's style of lurid writing is nothing short of hilarious. I've never read anything less erotic and more cringe-inducing than the half dozen sex scenes she feels she must intersperse throughout book. Alright, I give up. This book is huge and awful. I can no longer hold out hope for the series. I advise anyone listening to discard this book before it consumes more of your valuable life.
    • 3/5
      Hmmm...I don't know how this one survived my purge of paperbacks, when the two earlier volumes did not. I enjoyed the first two books in this series (Clan of the Cave Bear and Valley of the Horses) as easy, mindless reading for long business trips. This one though, as other reviewers have stated, read too much like a soap opera. It was the last I read in this series.
    • 4/5
      There is more romance in this third volume than in the first two books, but the history is still there, from details of stone tools, to burials, to dyes and hunts. Because it is fiction, there are a lot of liberties taken and some the facts have no way to be proven as actual history, but I found that as a story it was entertaining. Watching Jondalar and Ayla go through their multiple misunderstandings was sometimes painful to listen but only because as a reader I knew both parts. I enjoyed the baby wolf as much as I'd enjoyed reading about Ayla caring for the baby cave lion in the previous book. And the central message of accepting people even if they are a little different was brought across well. I've come to like Auel's writing style, but I can see that each book is becoming a little less great. I really liked the first two, but this book I liked slightly less. And I've been forewarned that this trend will continue. I'm going to give the next book a try for the history aspect if nothing else, so I'll give my judgment later. So far, I recommend these first three books to anyone interesting in prehistory or anthropology.
    • 5/5
      I have so much interest in prehistoric times and also historical fiction. It was wonderful and I’ll immediately start the next book

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      I love when an author creates two very strong characters who I know should be together, but they are so strong and stubborn that it could go either way in the end. I had to finish this well past my bedtime as I just had to know which way it would end up. 4?
    • 3/5
      I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with this series, especially this book.

      Reading about the culture of the fictional Mamutoi was interesting. The repetition, the brooding Jondalar, the love triangle that carried on for 400 pages was just awful.

      I only planned on reading the first 3, as I have heard the remaining 3 are pure drivel. I don't think I will be picking up book 4 anytime soon.
    • 4/5
      really liked how these books are also how to survive (to a degree)
    • 3/5
      Third in the Earth’s Children series set in the ice age. This could have been good. Her writing, for the most part, is good. Day to day living in a glacial world is well researched, thought out and portrayed. But, what? Was she in a contest with herself to see how stinking many times she could write sex scenes with phrasings that were not quite exactly the same? And how many scenes did she invent (should’ve kept track!) to show the guy and the gal misunderstanding each other?“They stared at each other, wanting each other, drawn to each other, but their silent shout of love went unheard in the roar of misunderstanding, and the clatter of culturally ingrained beliefs.”Why doesn’t he, why didn’t I . . . . over and over and over . . . The sheer repetitiveness of the sex scenes and misunderstanding scenes completely ruined what could have been a good story.
    • 5/5
      Totally consuming - great and strong characters - vivid description of the action and the environment
    • 2/5
      Two stars might be generous here, but I do have to give Auel credit for having a broad imagination. She's clearly a gifted writer, but her editor should have been more proactive in cutting this one down.

      To begin with, this book was entirely overwritten. Over 800 pages of material that should have been 400 or less - and the filler was just painful. I appreciate the attempt to show how daily life works in this author's interpretation of Prehistory, but there's only so much I can take of Ayla's love triangle, the preparation of food and clothing, and various other minutiae. Not only that, but Ayla has become utterly uninteresting. In the first and second novels, she was complicated, interesting, and above all else a character that the reader could relate to. In The Mammoth Hunters, she's the object of all adoration, discussion, contemplation, and desire. She can do no wrong....literally. The world simply doesn't work this way - nobody is perfect or all-knowing.

      I read this book out of a continuing admiration for Clan of the Cave Bear, but this is getting a little out of hand - this book was more of an awkward romance series with static characters rather than a survivalistic view of early man and Neanderthals. I'll probably read the next in the series as well, but my optimism for something refreshing and entertaining is almost entirely gone.

      2/5 for an imaginative world, yet serious, serious character development flaws, extreme overwriting, and having to force myself through awkward dialogue for hundreds of pages.

    • 2/5
      I was soooo disappointed to read this after soooo looking forward to it.
    • 4/5
      I've enjoyed this series, but less so with this book. Although I was glad to catch up with Ayla and hear that she found her "Others", the "romance triangle" was tedious and more annoying to read than interesting.
    • 2/5
      Well, I'm not in favour of deliberately making a long book, by using a number of cataloguing devices. The story limps along, the characters are flat, and the technology is often anachronistic. I gave up on the series and I think this was the last book of hers I read.
    • 2/5
      Too long. Series slipping a bit. May be done for awhile on these.
    • 5/5
      loved all of the books in this series. So well written and so well researched. There was a lot for me to discover her, even in "middle age". I know it's overused, but this series is truly classic.  
    • 3/5
      In the third book of the Earth's Children series, Ayla and Jondalar have left Ayla's remote valley home and have entered the territory of the Mamutoi People. This is Ayla's first real encounter with a tribe of her own Cro-Magnon race and she makes quite a first impression, with her tame horses and myriad inventions. However, controversy ensues when the Mamutoi learn that Ayla was raised by Neanderthals or "Flatheads". Will she still be accepted?Meanwhile, Ayla and Jondalar are having trouble in the romance department. Misinterpretations and misunderstandings abound. Ayla's cultural background makes it hard for her to communicate her needs, while Jondalar is wallowing in insecurity. To be honest, Jondalar really annoyed me in this book. He comes off as a self-absorbed, self-pitying boob with no observational skills what-so-ever. "Gee, Ayla looks unhappy, but I'm sure it has nothing to do with me!" Also: We don't need to hear for the umpteenth time how Ayla is the only female who can accommodate his massive member. We get it, Jean, he's well-hung. (Rolls eyes)Ayla also has a brief dalliance with an exotic, dark-skinned member of the Mamutoi, Ranec, who seems less like an erstwhile lover and more like a fawning worshiper. The love triangle between Ayla, Ranec, and Jondalar seems to drag on forever.Good points: The descriptions of weather, glacial landscapes, animals, and tribal customs are as interesting and meticulous as ever.And the character Rydag, a Neanderthal-Cro Magnon hybrid boy, is a poignant reminder of Ayla's own lost child. Her interactions with him are bittersweet and compelling.
    • 3/5
      My parents had a copy of this in their van when I was a kid so I used to always read it on car trips.

      I think these books and Judith Krantz's were my generation's main source of sex ed.
    • 3/5
      This is another lllllooonnnnggg book. It is interesting and I finished it but the length of it is so daunting. I think it would have been much better if it had been edited better. I am not going to finish the series, I don't think I could take it. Though I am interested in knowing how it all ends up.
    • 2/5
      The focus on graphic sex ruined this book for me. Too bad.