What science can do is listen carefully for whatever signal survives.

The bones.

The sediment.

The pollen, contested as it is.

The tool flakes.

The patterns of where the dead were placed.

The evidence of care for the injured, of repeated return to a specific location, of deliberate arrangement of the body.

From those fragments — of bone, of evidence, of possibility — researchers have been building a picture of who Neanderthals were.