She states that the volcano "lay and watched her forests being cut and her elk being hunted and her lakes being fished and fouled and her ecology being tampered with and the smoky, snarling suburbs creeping closer to her skirts, until she saw it was time to teach the White Man's Children a lesson ( Le Guin, 2000, p175). ... Why should she bear any that we can recognize?"...
The Neanderthals lived in groups of 30 to 50 individuals, they invented many of the tool types that were to be perfected by fully sapient peoples, they had weapons adequate to deal with both the cave lion and cave bear, they used body paint, buried their dead. ... Characteristic of the period were hunting and fishing settlements along rivers and on lake shores, where fish and mollusks were abundant. ...