Author’s Note
Modern ideas of what life was like in prehistoric times are based on two sources of information. One consists of actual remains, such as stone implements and fossilized bones, and their location and relationship to each other. The other is scientific guessing—reasoning, for example, that if primitive tribes today do so-and-so, then under similar conditions prehistoric men would do thus-and-thus. So, by knowing a little and deducing a lot, a general picture is built up, which is incomplete only in details.
Still, a story must have details, and to get them I had no choice but to make them up. I have, however, always tried to keep them plausible, as what might have happened, in the light of scientific facts and theories. An exception is the telescoping of time. The developments that occur in the time-span of this book undoubtedly took many generations. And yet who is to say?
—Jim Kjelgaard