Someone had to ensure he was fed when he could not participate in hunting or foraging.

Someone had to care for his physical needs in ways that went well beyond what was strictly necessary for the community’s economic survival.

The fifteen years he lived — recorded in the bones and the growth lines and the pathology of his skeleton — required a community that chose to invest in an individual who could not contribute in the ways that most members of a mobile hunter-gatherer band could contribute.

His burial in the Windover pond, in the same cemetery as everyone else, indicates that his community did not regard him as separate or lesser.