What Cannot Be Known

It is worth being direct about the limits of what the Shanidar Z evidence can tell us.

We cannot know what the people who placed her in the cave were thinking or feeling.

We cannot know whether they had a concept of an afterlife, a spirit world, or anything analogous to religious belief.

We cannot know whether they had language in the full modern human sense, or what they said to each other, or whether they grieved in the way modern humans grieve.

The pollen question — whether flowers were deliberately placed — has not been resolved and may never be fully resolved from the available evidence.