At some sites, they collected eagle talons and feathers, shells with traces of pigment, and other objects that appear to have had symbolic or decorative value.

They cared for their injured and elderly.

Several Shanidar individuals show evidence of significant physical disabilities or healed trauma that would have required assistance from others to survive.

Whether any of this amounts to what we would call symbolic thought, religion, or culture in the full modern sense remains genuinely uncertain.

But the image of the Neanderthal as a cognitive inferior — operating on instinct and basic reaction — has been systematically dismantled over the past three decades.

Shanidar Z fits within this larger recalibration.