Initially repelled by the boy's appearance, Edith soon begins to regard him as her own child, learning to love him and realizing that he is far more intelligent than she first imagined.
Edith fights the decision, knowing the boy cannot survive if returned to his own time due to his acquisition of modern dependencies and speech.
She attempts to smuggle the boy out of the facility, but when that plan fails she disrupts the integrity of the Stasis module and returns to the ancient past with Timmie.
The film is noteworthy for its fidelity to the short story, as well as the pathos between Timmy and Nurse Fellowes which garnered praise from both fans and reviewers.
This Neanderthal society—shown mainly from the point of view of an assertive tribal woman determined to prove herself the equal of the male hunters/warriors—is suddenly faced with the appearance of a completely different, competing kind of human being: the Cro-Magnons.
The ending suggests that in the modified past Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon would cooperate and come closer to each other in the common worship of the "Goddess" - with Timmie growing up to be her acolyte and a "demigod" himself.
It also suggests that the Neanderthals may not become extinct but could coexist with the Cro-Magnon, possibly interbreeding with them, which would change the whole of subsequent human history (or, according to a different theory of the implications of time travel, could have no effect at all due to the "convergent series").
Timmie was not returned to his own time, and it transpired that, due to his abduction, he was no longer the inventor of the technique for artificially creating fire, as he would have been.
This assumes, however, that a child snatched at complete random from prehistoric times would turn out to be exactly the unique inventor of making fire, and also that with him absent no one else would have invented it - both quite unlikely.