The Yana community had enough of both time and resources to invest some of each in beauty.

This investment in aesthetics, in the visual and material expression of identity and culture, is one of the markers that distinguishes modern human behavior from earlier forms of human behavior.

The capacity to make and appreciate decorative objects, to invest in the production of things that serve no immediate functional purpose, is part of what makes humans behaviorally modern in the anthropological sense.

The people at Yana were not proto-modern, pre-symbolic beings barely managing to feed themselves.