"The Shelters of Stone opens as Ayla and Jondalar, along with their animal friends, Wolf, Whinney, and Racer, complete their epic journey across Europe and are greeted by Jondalar?s people: the Zelandonii. The people of the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii fascinate Ayla. Their clothes, customs, artifacts, even their homes?formed in great cliffs of vertical limestone?are a source of wonder to her. And in the woman Zelandoni, the spiritual leader of the...

Ayla, cast out of the Clan, has been forced to follow the advice given her in the first book by her dying foster-mother Iza. She goes in search of "the Others"—that is, people like herself: European Cro-Magnon Homo sapiens, or early-modern humans, returned west and north to Europe after an incubation period of tens of millennia in the near and far east.

Riding Whinney with Jondalar, the man she loves, and followed by the mare's colt, Ayla ventures into the land of the Mamutoi. She has finally found the Others she has been seeking. Ayla is adopted because of her remarkable hunting ability, healing skills, and fire-making technique. Here she meets Ranec, the dark-skinned, magnetic master carver of ivory, whom she cannot refuse, inciting Jondalar to a fierce jealousy. Now she must choose between the...