Björn Kurtén's compelling novel gives the reader a detailed picture of life 35,000 years ago in Western Europe. One of the world's leading scholars of Ice Age fauna, Kurtén fuses extraordinary knowledge and imagination in this vivid evocation of our deepest past. This novel illuminates the lives of the humans who left us magnificent paintings in the caves of France and Spain.

"Björn Kurtén, a Swedish-speaking Finn who is an unquestioned giant of paleontology, proves with this exciting, lyrical, and often moving novel that there is nothing paradoxical about a scientist's creating first-rate fiction."—Raymond A. Sokolov, New York Times Book Review

"There is drama here—probably the greatest drama and the greatest puzzle of our history: the nature, the phenomenon, of the extinction of Neandertal man. This is in every respect an extraordinary novel. Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard scientist and scientific historian, contributes and appreciative and most useful introduction."—The New Yorker