Alpha, set 20,000 years ago in Europe, was apparently originally titled “Solutrean.” The change is probably for the best. It will come out next spring. I really hope that this movie is good and does well. It isn’t often that you have something which takes place during the Last Glacial Maximum.
The plot seems to reflect the what you might read in Pat Shipman’s The Invaders, but it’s about 20,000 years too late for her model to work. One of the major criticisms of the idea that dogs and modern humans operated as a team is that it seems way too early. But of late there have been suggestions that the date is earlier than we’d previous thought in relation to when dogs as we understand them arose: Ancient European dog genomes reveal continuity since the Early Neolithic. Here’s the relevant section: “By calibrating the mutation rate using our oldest dog, we narrow the timing of dog domestication to 20,000–40,000 years ago.”
Please note though that the divergence of the dog lineage from the ancestors of modern wolves is a distinct question and process from domestication as such as we understand it. Though it seems likely these events didn’t occur too far apart in time.