The narrator continues recounting Bruno's emails about Neanderthal anatomy. Bruno describes the Thals' large nasal passages for warming cold air, their large orbital bones for night vision, and their weak chins. He recalls handling a Neanderthal skull as a boy in a natural history museum, an image the narrator imagines as Bruno cradling the skull like a baby.

Bruno discusses two unusual skulls. One, found in southern Spain, had a stalagmite growing upward from it like a unicorn's horn, formed over thirty thousand years from mineral water drips. The other, from a Croatian cave, presents a puzzle: it has the face of a Neanderthal but the occipital bun and braincase of the earlier Homo erectus, suggesting an evolutionary hybrid whose face was a hundred thousand years more modern than its brain.

Bruno draws a moral lesson from this hybrid: you cannot judge a book by its cover. Some modern people may have contemporary faces but the minds and instincts of older ancestors. Even those who look like you may not think like you.

Bruno reflects on new genetic discoveries—Denisovans, the Hobbit (Homo floresiensis)—reshaping understanding of human evolution. He argues that the term "early man" is a misnomer; Homo sapiens arrived two million years after Homo habilis, making sapiens "late-arriving man," or Homo tardissimus, "Tardie." Bruno bitterly observes that Tardie arrived at the end of a vast hominin saga only to destroy everything.