Whatever relationship the Shanidar Neanderthals had with those plants, they were working with the specific botanical world they inhabited, not importing plants from elsewhere or associating with plant species that carried meaning in some other cultural context.

This is worth keeping in mind when interpreting the pollen evidence.

The plants were local.

Their presence in the cave is not inherently surprising.

What would be surprising — and what Leroi-Gourhan’s original analysis and the Cambridge team’s more recent work both try to assess — is whether their presence in the specific burial context, in the specific concentrations and combinations found, is more than incidental.

The Technology of the Excavation