If the people around her placed her body on its left side, in a location they had used before and would use again for the same purpose — that is a meaningful act.

If they gathered plants with specific properties and placed them with her body — that is a meaningful act that implies something about what they believed, or felt, or remembered.

We cannot read those meanings with certainty.

We can only observe that the physical traces they left behind are consistent with behaviors we associate with caring about the dead.

With doing something when someone dies beyond simply leaving them behind.

That consistency — between what the Shanidar evidence shows and what human funerary behavior looks like — is what makes the site so compelling and so contested.