Rosa Rubicondior: The Girl And The Wolf - A Novel From The Infancy Of Our Species

Saturday, 1 November 2025

The Girl And The Wolf - A Novel From The Infancy Of Our Species

The Girl And The Wolf: Bill Hounslow: 9798272050014: Amazon.com: Books

In Ice Age Europe, when modern humans were spreading across the continent and the last Neanderthals were fading from our story, something remarkable happened deep beneath the limestone hills of southern France. In the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, in the Ardèche valley, a young human child walked through a dark passage and left her footprints in the soft clay floor.

Beside her walked a wolf.

That much we know. Frozen in time for over 30,000 years, those parallel tracks hint at a moment of curiosity, courage, and perhaps companionship long before the first domesticated dogs trotted at our heels. They offer a tantalising glimpse into a forgotten world — the world that inspired my new novel.

The Girl and the Wolf is a story that imagines how such a bond might have begun. It follows Almora, an inquisitive, strong-willed child of the Drognai clan, raised alongside a rescued wolf cub named Sharma. As Almora grows into a capable young woman, her life takes an extraordinary turn when she meets Tanu — one of the last Neanderthals in Europe. Their unlikely love, and Tanu’s struggle to be accepted by Almora’s people, explores themes of kinship, belonging, and the courage to overcome fear of the Other.

The Real Chauvet Child and Wolf Tracks. In 1994, archaeologists exploring the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in the Ardèche region of France made an astonishing discovery: some of the oldest known human art on Earth — and something even more unexpected was to come.

In 2022, on the soft clay floor of a deep passageway, they discovered the footprints of a child, estimated to be around eight years old. Alongside them were the impressions of a large canid, likely a wolf. The tracks run side by side for several metres before disappearing into darkness, untouched for more than 30,000 years.

There is no evidence the animal was tamed, and it may simply have been following the child’s scent or path. But the fossil record occasionally offers us moments like this — fleeting hints of ancient encounters between humans and wolves before the process of domestication began.

The footprints raise intriguing possibilities:

Were early humans already forming tentative bonds with wild wolves?
Did shared hunting grounds foster familiarity and cautious tolerance?
Could small acts of curiosity and courage have eventually led to true companionship?
We cannot know with certainty what happened that day in Chauvet Cave. But those footprints remind us that the story of humans and wolves began long before the first village dogs lay beside our hearths — deep in the Ice Age, when the world was young and full of wonder.

This is a tale set in a landscape both harsh and beautiful, where survival depended on trust, skill, and the fragile alliances between people, animals, and the spirits of the land. It is a re-imagining of humanity’s earliest friendships — and the moment our destinies intertwined with wolves.

The Girl and the Wolf is fiction — but it grows from what science, archaeology, and palaeoanthropology can genuinely tell us about Ice Age Europe.

We know that modern humans and Neanderthals shared the same lands. They met, learned from one another, and sometimes formed bonds deep enough that their descendants still live within us. We know wolves lived alongside them, long before dogs slept by our fires. And we know a child once walked through Chauvet Cave with a wolf’s prints beside her — a moment silent in the clay for more than 30,000 years.

That footprint trail is real.

What we do not know is the story behind it.

Where the evidence speaks, I have tried to honour it. Where it is silent, imagination has stepped in — carefully, and with respect for what science allows us to infer.

We do not know what beliefs Neanderthals held, but they probably believed in some sort of afterlife, so I have filled that vacuum by imagining what beliefs might have sustained a population for a quarter of a million years as hunter-gatherers in the Ice Age Europe, where an intimate knowledge of the natural world would have been essential. We now know they were not the lumbering brutes of legend but were culturally sophisticated, probably spoke in complex languages and were able to articulate abstract ideas.

But this story is not only about prehistory. It is also about what it means to be human.

In imagining Almora’s world, I hoped to explore values that remain vital today:

Open-mindedness - seeking truth from observation, experience, and reason, not rumour or fear.
Tolerance and empathy - recognising the dignity of those who are different, as Almora’s people learn to accept Tanu.
Non-violence and cooperation - showing that survival can come not from dominance, but from kindness, curiosity, and shared purpose.
Humanist ethics - valuing compassion, courage, and moral choice without invoking supernatural guidance.
Respect for the natural world - understanding that we are part of the living landscape, not its masters; that our connection with other creatures enriches us.

These themes are not anachronisms imposed upon the past, but enduring possibilities within it — moments where humanity could choose curiosity over suspicion, respect over fear, coexistence over conflict. Ancient people were no less capable of wisdom, imagination, tenderness, or growth than we are.

This book is my attempt to give voice to that potential: a story grounded in evidence, guided by empathy, and enriched by wonder — a reminder that the roots of our humanity reach far deeper into the past than we often imagine, and that the choices we make still shape the world around us.

May Almora’s journey encourage open minds, generous hearts, and a renewed respect for the wild world we share.

The book is available in Hardback, Paperback, eBook for Kindle and Audio versions.

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