Thirty-thousand years ago, the fate of humanity rested on our ability to adapt to the last great glaciation, when ice stormed out of the north and forced us out of the trees and onto the steppes, where we were both hunter and hunted. Wolves, too, whose fortunes rise and fall with the health of the herds, could sense something different in the wind. When Silex, the young leader of the Wolfen tribe, brings tribute to a clever she-wolf, everything changes. The alpha wolf learns that in times of famine she can turn to man for food, a lesson passed on to her descendants.