The face that emerged is a product of modern science — the CT scanner, the digital modeling software, the specialist’s eye.

But the bones it is based on are the remnants of an actual person who lived before any of these technologies were imaginable, who probably had no concept of being analyzed and reconstructed and displayed sixty or seventy-five millennia after her death.

What she leaves open is the question that drove the original excavations, the ongoing Cambridge work, and the decades of debate about Neanderthal burial: what did it mean, to the people who put her there?

The answer is almost certainly more complex than either “nothing” or “exactly what modern human burial means.” It was probably something specific to that community, in that cave, at that moment in the deep past — a practice that arose from their particular experience of living and dying in the Zagros Mountains, shaped by the cognitive capacities and social structures of a species that was both related to us and genuinely different.