Shanidar Z — The 75,000-Year-Old Neanderthal Woman Whose Crushed Skull Was Rebuilt From More Than 200 Pieces
The evidence for the higher-threshold interpretation — for flowers, for ritual, for meaning-making — is more ambiguous.
The importance of this distinction is not merely academic.
Whether Neanderthals engaged in intentional burial in the lower sense is reasonably well-supported by the cumulative evidence from Shanidar and from other Neanderthal sites.
Whether they engaged in it in the higher sense — whether they were doing something we would recognize as mourning, as honoring, as ritual — is the question that remains genuinely open.
And that question matters because it bears on what Neanderthals were cognitively capable of.
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