The researchers note that removal of the brain could relate to cannibalism, and they do not rule it out, but they do not argue for it as the most likely explanation.

The skull preparation interpretation is perhaps the more intuitively accessible of the two for modern readers, because it connects to documented practices of skull curation in the broader Iron Age British and European world.

Human skulls were treated as significant objects in Iron Age communities across Britain and continental Europe — kept, curated, displayed, and sometimes used in ways that suggest they were understood as carrying the presence or power of the individuals they had belonged to.

If the Loch Borralie skull was being prepared for this kind of ongoing relationship between the living community and a particular dead person, the removal of the brain — soft tissue that would decompose rapidly and potentially damage the structure of the skull through bacterial activity and pressure — would be a practical step in a larger process of preservation.