Animal gnawing tells you something about what happened to the body after burial, potentially including information about the completeness of the burial context and whether the grave had been disturbed by scavengers.

Human-made cut marks tell you something about what people chose to do to this body, which is a fundamentally different and far more interpretively significant category of information.

When the COMMIOS team re-examined the Loch Borralie skeletal remains under this analytical framework, using microscopic examination to characterize the specific morphology of marks on the bone surfaces, they found that what had initially been attributed to animal activity was in fact, at least in significant part, the product of deliberate human action.

The Woman’s Skull: What the Evidence Shows