The Loch Borralie discovery changes something specific in the understanding of Iron Age funerary practice in Scotland and Britain more broadly.

It provides direct evidence — of a kind that had not previously existed in the record — for a specific practice: the deliberate removal of brain tissue from a skull shortly after death, followed by the systematic modification of long bones and their eventual anatomical repositioning in a formal burial.

This is genuinely new knowledge.

The general proposition that Iron Age communities treated their dead in complex and varied ways was already established in the archaeological literature before the Loch Borralie paper appeared.

The evidence from multiple other sites — the skull deposits in rivers, the human bones in settlement contexts, the complex multi-individual deposits in Iron Age sites — had already established that the treatment of the dead in Iron Age Britain was not reducible to simple burial.