Solecki’s excavations covered portions of the cave’s interior, and the Cambridge team has focused on areas adjacent to the original excavation.

Large areas of the cave’s sediment deposits remain uninvestigated.

It is not known what those deposits contain.

Given what has been found in the portions that have been investigated — the burial cluster, the extraordinary quantity of Neanderthal remains, the rich assemblage of stone tools and animal bone — the uninvestigated portions of the cave may well contain additional significant material.

The site also raises methodological questions that apply beyond Shanidar.

The new techniques deployed by the Cambridge team — three-dimensional documentation, micro-stratigraphy, contamination-controlled pollen analysis — have demonstrated what modern methods can extract from a site that was partly excavated with earlier technology.