For later burials to be placed in the same location as earlier ones, the community needed to remember — or to have a way of knowing — that the location was already in use for this purpose.

That knowledge could have been transmitted in various ways.

It could have been preserved in oral tradition, if the Shanidar Neanderthals had the linguistic capacity to transmit such information verbally.

It could have been preserved through physical marking of the location, though no such markings have been identified.

It could have been preserved through social memory — through the collective recall of a community that had been present at earlier burials and remembered where the dead were placed.

Whatever the mechanism, the implication is that the Shanidar community maintained knowledge of the burial location across time — across at least enough time for earlier burials to be partially or fully decomposed before later ones were added.