The presence of older individuals in the cemetery — individuals who had lived long enough to accumulate the skeletal markers of advancing age — indicates that the community supported people through the full range of life stages.

Older individuals who could no longer fully participate in the most physically demanding aspects of subsistence work were not excluded from the community’s care.

This pattern of care is not uniquely human — many animal species show evidence of social support for injured or vulnerable members.

But it is distinctly human in its scale and organization, and it is one of the defining characteristics of human social life that the archaeological record, at its best, can illuminate.

Windover, with its extraordinary preservation, allows this illumination in unusual depth.