The interior of the peninsula would have looked different: different drainage patterns, different lake and pond configurations, perhaps different vegetation.

But the people of Windover were fully modern in every biological sense.

They spoke a language — we cannot know what language, only that they certainly had one.

They had social relationships, kinship networks, beliefs about the world and about death.

They made things by hand — tools, clothing, containers — using the materials that their environment provided.

They processed food, cooked food, treated illness and injury, raised their children, buried their dead.

The “8,000 years old” framing, however accurate as a shorthand, can obscure something important: these were people, not curiosities.