The story opens on prehistoric Earth, in the opening years of an ice age. The Autobots and Decepticons fight their war here, using dinosaur and insect altmodes (most of them distinctively spiky). These "Ice Age Wars" draw to a close as the cold gets worse. Some of the Autobots retreat into a cave, and place themselves in stasis lock, to wait for external conditions to improve. Millions of years pass. The glaciers that forced the Transformers into stasis lock recede, and humans gradually take over the earth's surface...