They were placed back into the cairn in their correct anatomical positions — in the places where a femur or an ulna would be expected to sit in an articulated human body.

Someone worked the woman’s bones into tools and then put them back in her grave, arranged as if she were still assembled.

The care inherent in this repositioning is one of the most interpretively significant details of the entire discovery.

If the purpose of modifying the bones had been purely utilitarian — if the goal was simply to obtain functional bone tools from available material — there would be no reason to return them to their original positions in a burial.

The return of the modified bones to anatomical position in the cairn suggests that the person’s physical integrity — the arrangement of her body as a body rather than as a collection of raw material — was maintained even after the modification of her remains.