The timing of these interactions, and their nature, is one of the most intensely studied questions in paleoanthropology.

The interbreeding evidence from ancient DNA shows that Neanderthals and modern humans did not simply coexist peacefully at a distance.

They met.

They had children together.

Those children — or their descendants — carried Neanderthal DNA that persists in living human populations outside of sub-Saharan Africa today.

Shanidar Z was part of that eastern Neanderthal population.

Whatever her community’s traditions of burial and care for the dead, they were practices that emerged in this specific geographic and ecological context — in mountain caves, in a region that was also seeing the first movements of anatomically modern humans into and through the same general area.

The Zagros mountains were, in this sense, not a remote backwater of Neanderthal territory.