Their community’s practices deserve to be understood as coherent responses to their specific cultural world rather than as simply bizarre or inexplicable.

The Loch Borralie study’s language of care and reverence — the interpretation that the elaborate post-mortem treatment of Individual 1 reflects her community’s respect for her — is one way of doing this respectful engagement.

It acknowledges that the practices, however unusual they appear from outside, were understood from within as expressing something meaningful about the relationship between the community and this specific person.

The broader public reception of the discovery, which was extensive and largely characterized by curiosity rather than voyeurism, suggests that there is a genuine appetite for this kind of thoughtful engagement with the ancient past — for evidence about how people in very different circumstances and with very different beliefs lived and died, presented in ways that honor both the scientific significance of the discovery and the humanity of the people it concerns.