There were other communities, other mortuary practices, other organic technologies, other human lives lived in the same landscape at the same time.

Those communities left stone tools that survive and organic records that do not.

The Windover community left what it left because the pond it happened to choose preserved it.

The preservation was not intention.

It was chemistry.

The people buried there were not trying to preserve themselves for the benefit of future science.

They were burying their dead in a specific pond that their community understood as the appropriate place — a practice maintained across what appears to have been multiple generations of community life.

The conditions of the pond did the rest.