SportsFan68 wrote:
I can easily imagine that -- maize is highly prevalent in Hopi artistic depictions, as are rain and rain clouds.
The preponderance of the evidence is for animals, and I almost certainly would have gone that way even without Auel. But for certain? I don't know...
One significant difference in your example: the Hopi had progressed beyond being hunter/gatherers to being an agricultural society. Ayla and Jondalar (despite being great innovators who had personally domesticated dogs, cats and horses, and invented the atlatl and the flint & steel method of firemaking) hadn't.