What the long history of human bone as tool material suggests is that the distinction between the human body as a person and the human body as a material resource — a distinction that many modern frameworks treat as absolute — was in various historical contexts more permeable.

The use of a person’s physical substance for practical purposes was not inherently incompatible with maintaining that person’s significance as a specific individual in the social world of the community.

The Loch Borralie evidence — in which the tools made from Individual 1’s bones were returned to her burial in anatomical position — suggests precisely this kind of permeable boundary.

Her bones served a purpose as tools, and then they were restored to being her bones in the context of her burial.

The instrumental and the personal were not mutually exclusive; they coexisted within a framework of practice that we can observe in its physical traces but cannot fully reconstruct in its meaning.