These artistic works are not as conflicted as romances that take place in Hollywood but they often encounter problems, mostly because the authors cannot help but update them to a world that more resembles something closer to antiquity or even medievalism than actual prehistory.
Of course, we don't know much about prehistory (though more and more what with discovering dead people in glaciers and enhanced archaeological tools)--and without written records any evidence is difficult to corroborate. Not the easiest time period to reconstruct.
Yuval Noah Harari of Sapiens argues,
It stands to reason that the ethnic and cultural variety among ancient hunter-gatherers was equally impressive [as that in current clans]...one band might have been belligerent and the other peaceful...in other words, while anthropological observations of modern foragers can help us understand some of the possibilities available to ancient foragers, the ancient horizon of possibilities was much broader, and most of it is hidden from our view. (44-45)
The problem, as Steven Pinker points out and Harari corroborates, is that genocide in pre-history was kind of a norm: entire clans could be wiped out in a single skirmish. And people did not live that long.
Consequently, romance in prehistory seems rather like a romance on the Titanic: they fall in love and...dead. They get over their differences and...dead. They pull a Romeo & Juliet and...everybody is dead!
The manga Wild Rock is fun though my favorite part of the manga is the fathers' story. And I did in fact read Clan of the Cave Bear years ago during Math (until I got moved to the front of the classroom for reading during Math and failing--it was the failing part of the equation that got me moved; the teacher was willing to tolerate other curricula activities if I could keep up; I was very bored at the front of the room, but I passed).
Despite my "boy, I'm really suspending my belief here" attitude about cave folks in love, I do love the "find" in Bones in which Bones and Clark make peace. The team comes to the conclusion that a Neanderthal man and Homo Sapiens woman married and had a child--only to be killed by an interloper. But they all died together.
They loved and...died! So Bones, once again, gets it right.
