The burial question — whether the placement of the body was intentional — is, in the view of many researchers, now quite strong.

The body position, the context, the pattern of Neanderthal burials across the site and across the species’ range all support the interpretation that this was not accidental deposition.

But “intentional burial” leaves open an enormous range of possibilities for what the act meant to the people who performed it.

The facial reconstruction gives us a face.

It does not give us a person in the full biographical sense — the relationships she had, the experiences she accumulated over what appears to have been a long life, the specific knowledge she carried about this landscape and these plants and these people.

Those things are gone.