After encountering a variety of animals in his search for a warm place, a boy living in prehistoric times returns to the warmth of his parents' cave.

In this sequel to The Clan of the Cave Bears, Jean Auel continues the story of Ayla. Ayla sets out on a journey to meet others like herself during which she encounters a herd of horses and rescues a young man from death.

Forbidden to make images, fourteen-year-old Tao, the boy with the bad foot, yearns to be a cave painter, recording the figures of the mammals, rhinos, bison, and other animals of his prehistoric times.

After their epic journey across Europe, Ayla and Jondalar have reached his home, the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii, the old stone age settlement in the region known today as southwest France. Jondalar's family greet him warmly, but they are initially wary of the beautiful young woman he has brought back, with her strange accent and her tame wolf and horses.

A saga of life thirty thousand years ago during the Ice Age depicts the lives of the shaman Thorn, an outsider named Elga, and Loon, the next shaman, who is struggling to find his own path in a treacherous and uncertain world.

"Marked as tabat--the unlucky one--Kai and his wolf, Uff, must brave the long winter together and learn what it takes to survive on their own"--

In two parallel stories, an intelligent female member of a prehistoric tribe becomes instrumental in advancing the lot of her people, and the daughter of a paleontologist is visiting him on a dig in Africa when important fossil remains are discovered.

Ayla struggles to find a balance between her duties as a new mother and her training to become a Zelandoni -- one of the Ninth Cave community's spiritual leaders and healers.

A collection of chapters set in different historical periods, but featuring the same protagonists. Twenty chapters in all, beginning with prehistory and ending in the future. The characters and the action represent the evolution of mankind, the novel attempting to answer the question, what does it mean to be human?