Before the Cambridge team’s work, the debate about Neanderthal burial at Shanidar had somewhat stalled.

Leroi-Gourhan’s pollen analysis from the 1960s was the primary evidence for the flower burial hypothesis, and the criticisms of that evidence — the contamination problem, the rodent hypothesis — had not been adequately addressed by subsequent work.

The site had become a fixed reference point in a debate that was not moving forward.

The Cambridge excavation changed that.

By finding Shanidar Z — a new individual, in apparently undisturbed sediment, associated with the burial cluster — and by applying modern methods to the analysis of the burial context, the team injected new empirical content into a debate that had been running largely on the same evidence for decades.

The new pollen analysis did not resolve the flower burial question.