Because if it is genuine, it pushes back the origin of something we tend to think of as distinctly human — the recognition that death deserves a response, that a body that held a person deserves specific treatment — to a time and a population that we have spent decades trying to separate from ourselves.

The skull fragments from Shanidar Z were compressed and shattered by 75,000 years of geology.

Researchers extracted them, scanned them, and assembled them into a face.

The face looks out at us.

Behind it, under those reconstructed features, is the question that the entire Shanidar site has been asking since Solecki first found the flower burial cluster in 1960.

Did the people who were with her when she died feel something that we would recognize?