Status Updates From El clan del oso cavernario ...

Slow Mama

I'm perplexed by this book's conception of gender and race. On the one hand, it's obviously setting up to break down the Clan's gender roles in order to make Ayla a larger figure. At the same time, Alya is clearly a white girl in a nonwhite society. Or is it wrong to characterize the Clan as nonwhite, since they're the dominant society in this area? I wonder if humans in this era actually had gender roles like this.