They were not evidence for a revolutionary claim — that Neanderthals were capable of symbolic behavior.

That claim was already well-supported.

They were evidence for a specific kind of symbolic behavior in a specific well-documented context, examined with methods that allowed more rigorous evaluation than had previously been possible.

What the Mousterian Stone Tools Tell Us

The stone tools recovered from the Neanderthal occupation layers at Shanidar Cave deserve more attention than they typically receive in popular accounts of the site, which tend to focus on the burial evidence to the exclusion of the broader material culture.

The assemblage is predominantly Mousterian — consistent with what is found at Neanderthal sites across Europe and western Asia.