Different societies have answered these questions in radically different ways, and the diversity of those answers is itself important evidence about the range of possibilities that human culture encompasses.

The Iron Age community at Loch Borralie answered these questions in ways that are, from the outside, startling: by removing the brain from a woman’s skull, by working her arm and leg bones into tools, and by then carefully reassembling her modified remains in a cairn of stones beside a Highland lake.

Whatever these actions meant to the people who performed them, they were not the actions of people indifferent to the dead or incapable of complex thought.

They were the actions of people who had a specific and elaborated understanding of what the dead were and what relationships the living owed them.