Director Roland Emmerich has set 19-year-olds Steven Strait ("Undiscovered", "Sky High") and Camilla Belle ("When a Stranger Calls") to star in "10,000 B.C.," a period epic drama that will begin shooting April 24th reports The Hollywood Reporter.

Strait will play a youngster far down in the pecking order of a primitive tribe that survives by hunting migrating mammoth. He pines for a princess well above his station. When the tribe's hunters are enslaved and the princess kidnapped, the boy realizes his tribe is headed for extinction unless he takes action.

Robert Rodat ("The Patriot") wrote the most recent draft, the ambition to illustrate three stages of primitive man. The film, which will shoot in South Africa and Namibia, is pegged as the studio's Summer 2007 tentpole.