That understanding is not accessible in its full depth from the physical evidence.

The cut marks on the skull and the worked edges of the long bones are evidence of actions, not of the thoughts that motivated those actions.

The gap between the physical and the cognitive is irreducible in the study of the prehistoric past.

But the physical evidence is enough to reveal that the gap exists — that behind the modified bones and the fractured skull, there was a community of thinking, feeling people who had specific beliefs about what their dead required of them and who acted on those beliefs with care and intention.

The Loch Borralie discovery makes that community visible, in outline if not in detail, across a distance of two thousand years.