She was here.

She was someone.

And the people who were with her, when she died, appear to have known it.

The Iron Age of Neanderthal Studies: What Changed in Thirty Years

The history of how scientists have thought about Neanderthals is itself a story worth telling, because it explains why the Shanidar Z findings are so significant and why they generated such intense interest.

For most of the twentieth century, the standard model of Neanderthals was relatively fixed.