This threshold requires effort but not necessarily any elaborate meaning-making.

At a more demanding level, intentional burial might require something we would recognize as funerary practice: belief in what death means, a sense that the body deserves specific treatment, a cultural memory of how previous deaths were handled.

This is a cognitive and social claim that goes well beyond simple body disposal.

The evidence from Shanidar — both from Solecki’s excavations and from the Cambridge team’s new work — supports the lower-threshold interpretation.

Bodies appear to have been deliberately placed, in specific positions, in a location that was used repeatedly.