It is Europe, 30,000 years ago. A short, stooped brute shuffles across a cold, windswept landscape, dragging the scavenged leg from a reindeer, and ducks his massive bulk under the rock overhang of a cave consumed in shadow. His scraggly hair covers an apelike face with protruding brow ridges and falls on massive hunched shoulders set on a hairy body with thick short legs. He grunts to the females cowering in one corner of the cave, then turns to face a group of young males, pounding his chest and howling. He has reestablished his dominance, for the short term at least.

The males jump on the deer leg, ripping meat from it with their hands and smashing the bones with crudely developed stone tools. Blood drips from their massive jaws. They grunt, belch, and fart. The females sneak scraps thrown aside in the scuffle. There are more grunts, and fights break out. A few chunks of meat clinging to broken bones are heaved to youngsters hidden in the dark recesses of the cave. They gnaw on the bones, sucking and slurping the marrow.