None of these interpretive frameworks is definitively confirmed by the physical evidence alone.

What the evidence does confirm is that the people who buried this child were people with a rich cultural life — with beliefs about death and what follows it, with practices for marking the death of community members, with the economic capacity to deposit significant technological wealth with a deceased person, and with specific symbolic practices including the use of red ochre that connected this burial to a broader tradition of mortuary behavior.

These were not simple people living simple lives.

They were fully modern human beings with the full range of cognitive and cultural capacity, expressing that capacity in their treatment of their dead.