Not by an enormous margin — 75,000 years ago is not radically earlier than the earliest modern human symbolic behaviors — but the point is that the timeline is not as clean as the old model assumed.

The old model placed symbolic behavior as a distinctly modern human capacity that emerged in our lineage and was absent in Neanderthals.

The evidence from Shanidar, combined with the other evidence for Neanderthal symbolic behavior accumulating from sites across Europe, suggests a messier and more interesting picture: symbolic behavior emerging, in various forms, across the broader human lineage at roughly similar times, in populations that were in contact and sharing genes.

That is a different story than the one that dominated the field for decades.