They supported their disabled members.

They made necklaces for their young children.

They oriented their dead toward the west and held them in the peat with wooden stakes and placed them there, carefully, in a practice maintained across what appears to have been multiple generations.

The conditions of the pond preserved traces of this — far more traces than any other site from this period has preserved, far more than most people would have thought possible in humid subtropical Florida.

The brain tissue that survived in some of the skulls was not the most important finding of the Windover excavation, whatever the headline implies.